‘My food was an abomination’

Miscusi sashays into London with breezy confidence. There are 12 branches across Italy, in seven cities. Its founder, Alberto Cartasegna, pronounces that this is not just a restaurant: it is a beacon of a new way of dining, of sustainability, of nutritional balance, of regenerative agricultural projects, waltzing towards a future free of plastic, free of waste. So get this: if you order their low-carbon-footprint pasta you get double loyalty points. They feel good, you feel good; the world can rest easy. Except for one crucial thing: the food and drink they offered me – and I can only speak from my experience of the new Covent Garden restaurant – was an abomination.

Indeed, if this was an ambassador for Italian cuisine, Miscusi ought to be summoned by the Foreign Office, if not the Italian embassy, and expelled. Unless, that is, Italian food has taken a turn for the worse since I last visited (and it is about three years because, you know) and is now stodgy and dull, and the wine universally undrinkable – in which case, if replicating that, Miscusi is bang on the money.

But, come with me into this clean and modern establishment, half pasta shop, half sort of canteen, in the new-build enclave of Covent Garden called Slingsby Place. On arrival you might be offered a bruschetta – though not if you were my guest. The girl on the door appeared to look her up and down and, taking the view, perhaps, that she was a little too far north of 16 years old, did not deign to acknowledge her.

Then watch us as we sit beneath a ceiling hanging with wheat, distracted by a TV playing a rolling showreel video of Miscusi, of happy farms, happy chefs, happy diners, on and on.

First we ask for some wine. Red or white, they ask. What do you have, we rejoin. Red or white they repeat. In great places, this beautifully simple offer can be a revelation. Not here. The unnamed grape – they didn’t know what it was – was nasty, insipid, acrid. We tried the red, which was no better. Perhaps environmental Alberto uses it for his car as well. I wouldn’t feed it to my mower.

Now comes the concept. You pick a classic pasta sauce, then match it with a pasta.

But first, what about a starter? What, no starters? We improvise and order a main side. No, not the hummus – that great classic from the tomes of historic Italian cookery – or a large plate of ‘eggplant parmigiana’, instead a vast glob of burrata with little semi-dried cherry tomatoes and a sprinkling of green ‘pesto powder’. The cheese is over-chilled and free of flavour, as is the powder. And it comes with two slices of untoasted sourdough, which we don’t eat, as we are not teens in need of a carb overload.

Spotting cacio pepe, one of Italy’s most fabulously simple and epic dishes, I ask for it – but noting it comes as something called ‘cacio pepe funghi’, I ask to have it as would be traditional, without the funghi. We have it with spaghetti. It is overcooked, stodgy, properly inedible. But not as bad as the carbonara tagliatelle. It is so thick, so heavy, that we cut it like a cake. Yup. For the Italian purist, slices of treason.

‘May we have a single scoop of chocolate gelato with two spoons?’ we ask. Of course not, computer says we must have two. So we have watery, sugary dollops, one of vanilla, one of chocolate.

Miscusi, for this rotten interpretation of one of the great food cultures on earth, you have no excusi.