Dining Out 002: Brutto
Dinner in Farringdon.
My experience of being a single 30-year-old woman in London is that it is very much a game of two halves.
Sometimes you are completely full of it, wafting around, giving it the big Carrie Bradshaw: your diary heaves with social engagements, you are clopping between them wearing expensive boots that you bought using Klarna Pay In Three, and your fringe hasn’t dried weird. Mostly, however, you are brought back down to earth by situations so stupid that they would be rejected as gags in shit Channel 4 sitcoms about Messy Women Trying To Have It All In The Capital, for being too on-the-nose (and I am thinking here specifically of the time when I had to get my contraceptive coil urgently checked out on a Sunday, ended up waiting and crying for five hours in a gynecological clinic intended for pregnant women in Guy’s Hospital, before eventually being examined, naked from the waist down, in a large-windowed room with a full view of Big Ben).
You swing between feeling like God in a miniskirt and lonely or vulnerable multiple times a day. It’s gratifying to know you can do exactly as you please all the time, and that you don’t have to rely on anyone else for anything at all – but there are, admittedly, some occasions when it would just be nice to.
The constant oscillation is made bearable, of course, by your friends in the same boat. A lot of my pals are in long-term relationships, but some of them aren’t, and it’s fun to gossip and commiserate with those people (a dear friend of mine texts me a rat emoji whenever he’s done something ridiculous on a date and I sincerely love it). I mention all of this here – you are, after all, reading a newsletter about food; sorry I’ve not got to that yet, and sorry also for saying the thing about the coil in basically the first paragraph – because I have one friendship group in particular which was brought together, concurrently, by two things: breakups and restaurants.
I became close mates with Imogen and Elise a while ago. They are two of the most wonderful people I know – Imo is frighteningly clever, endlessly loving, and shows more patience with me than anyone I’ve ever met, and Elise is a brilliant and demented live wire, whose sheer zeal for life is one of the most sparkling traits I have ever witnessed in a person. A couple of years back, we all had relationships end at similar times, and we started going out for dinner together to yap about dating and take photos for our app profiles (the Hinge version of “Woman Laughing Alone With Salad,” surely, is “Woman Smiling At Friend Holding Aperol Spritz”). While we’re not all single anymore, the dinners are something we still do now, and recently, in the spirit of the way that eating and moaning and laughing bonded us, we decided to expand the circle by each inviting a fun, cool friend along to the place we love to go out to the most.
Farringdon’s Trattoria Brutto is probably the nearest thing I’ve experienced to an ideal restaurant, in terms of what I believe that to be. Everything there is just how I like it: the drinks are cheap, strong and well-made (£5 negronis!), the tablecloths are checkered in that tongue-in-cheek, pastiche-y English trattoria way, the light is low so everyone looks twice as sexy, and the music is emphatically not the tasteful, mellow R&B or lite disco that you get in more self-consciously cool places (it actually leans towards soft rock, for those who like their pasta with a side of Meat Loaf, which, obviously, I do). Most crucially of all, however, you can eat an absolutely cracking meal there for about £50 a head, including wine, an intro spritz and a limoncello at the end. I’ve never been on a date to Brutto but I tell everyone else that they should all the time.
Imo, Elise and I are all united by our vigorous enthusiasm for the place, anyway, so on Maundy Thursday, we planned to go along. Imo brought Lucinda, Elise brought Izzy, and I brought Lucy, who illustrates Dining Out (I say I “brought” Lucy but I actually arrived last; I missed the Overground because I got distracted when posting this photo of June Brown on my Instagram story). We were seated at a round table with a candle in a wine bottle in the middle, and everyone settled in with drinks – spritzes, negronis or martinis.
The best thing about being at dinner with a reasonably big group is that you get to eat loads of different stuff from the menu. When it came time for starters, we ordered for the table: crudites, chicken liver toasts, cannellini bean toasts, anchovies with sourdough and yellow curls of butter, and Brutto’s notoriously moreish coccoli – essentially savoury doughnuts, accurately called “cuddles” on the English version of the menu – served warm for ripping apart and stuffing with stracciatella and Prosciutto.
Everything was good, though I wouldn’t bother with the crudites again, and of the toasts, the cannellini bean variety was the clear winner (there’s something about the earthiness of a bean, seasoned well, cooked until it browns and pops, and then pureed, that I really j’adore). The stars of the Brutto antipasti selection, though, are undoubtedly those coccoli – pillowy as a Botticelli nude, served with very fine, very pure-tasting cheese, and thin, salty ham – and the anchovies, with bread and butter. I really respect cooking that is confident enough to step back and just let great components do their thing: that is what these two starters have in common, and it’s also why they’re the best two.
For our mains, we all plumped for pasta. One person opted for Brutto’s intensely porky tortelloni in rich brodo, one for pappardelle with rabbit and lemon, and the rest ordered penne alla vodka, me included. The food at Brutto is, by and large, specifically Florentine by persuasion – the house speciality is bistecca alla fiorentina; that is, a cut of steak which effectively has fillet meat on one side of the bone and sirloin meat on the other – though penne alla vodka is a dish whose lasting associations feel more Italian-American than anything else (it did originate in Italy, probably Bologna, but it just feels inextricable from New York City in my mind). Made with tomatoes, onions, heavy cream and, of course, vodka, it’s a loud-mouthed twist on probably the simplest and most classic Italian dish of all (that is, pasta alla Napoletana, or pasta with a sauce made with tomato and olive oil). Penne alla vodka is the shoulder padded suit of pastas – the Elvis of pastas – and at Brutto it’s the most fantastic, balls-to-the-wall delicious thing on the menu.
I tend to think that the dominant ideology of pasta in London – represented by places like Padella and Bancone – is sort of antithetical to the actual spirit of pasta. There’s nothing wrong with a seat at a sleek counter, and a round, white plate of prettily arranged fazzoletti, finished off with a smoked egg yolk or whatever, but it all just feels a bit sterile to me. You might disagree – pasta after all is a craft, but as I think of it, it is foremostly a family food, a comfort food. I grew up watching my southern Italian grandmother’s huge saucepans bubble away on the hob, as oil marbled on the surface of the sugo, which would then be ladled over heaving bowls of penne or rigatoni. I’d take chubby litlle child fistfuls of grated Parmesan and dump it all over my dish, and after we’d all eaten, everyone at the table, even the grown-ups, would need to wipe their gobs with kitchen roll.
I love the penne alla vodka at Brutto because it is tasty, of course – the cream mellows out the acidic tomato in such a decadent way, and there’s a gloss and a weight to the sauce that helps it to coat and cling to the penne, making each bite properly delectable. More importantly, though, I love it because when it comes to the table, placed down on the gingham glistening and steaming, I’m immediately put back into the straightforwardly cosy headspace that for me, a bowl of pasta absolutely has to conjure.
In Brutto’s Instagram bio, the place self-describes as “Noisy. Not fancy”, and instructs diners: “Don’t expect too much,” which is a funny thing for a restaurant with a Michelin Bib Gourmand (not quite a Michelin star, but a sort of hearty recommendation from the people that give the stars out) to say about itself – though that, clearly, is more about eschewing fussiness than it is anything to do with quality. Ultimately, this is a restaurant which fosters conviviality in everything it does. You go in, you sit down, and your whole experience therein is simply about being made to feel as light, as easy, as satisfied, as possible.
When the news of the death of Russell Norman – who founded Brutto and, with his restaurant Polpo, essentially changed dining in London, via the introduction of small plates culture, back in the late 2000s – came late last year, I had only been there a few days before, with my dad, who immediately liked it as much as me. It was extremely sad to hear, and provoked an outpouring from kitchens in the capital and beyond. Norman was a beloved restaurateur and chef who prioritised hospitality above everything, and Brutto still feels like the vital embodiment of that ideal. By anyone’s account, the place is a beautiful living legacy.
Because Brutto is so reliable – the service is attentive, the atmosphere is always popping, the light lovely, the playlist jovial, and the food accomplished – it’s the type of restaurant where you genuinely can just focus on having a great time. To that end, it is a restaurant where you feel like a good version of yourself. That’s a special thing for a place to do for its punters, and it’s how I felt when I ate there with my five friends a couple of Thursdays ago.
We passed dishes around the table and conversation – as it will tend to when five out of six of the women present in a group are single – turned to dating (via a quick digression regarding what the fuck actually happens on Maundy Thursday; as the table’s two Catholics, Elise and I gave everyone a lively and highly knowledgeable rundown). Some people talked about who they were seeing, some slagged off those they were no longer seeing, and everyone “what the fuck”-ed at horror stories, agog over glasses of house white. It was fun, and it felt glamorous, and I was very happy.
Like I said when I began, there’s often more than a little abjection involved in the specific circumstance of being a single woman in a large city – the ever-present dread of the WhatsApp archive, the minor indignity of third-wheeling, fucking Feeld – but it can also be kind of awesome, when you are with your friends, waving a drink around, making them laugh about the time you went on a date with a bloke who had an honest to God tattoo of the Shard. And while you can’t, in the end, be Carrie Bradshaw all the time (or even that much of the time, to be honest – it’s too expensive and the shoes hurt), sometimes it’s good to order a Martini, a bowl of penne and a couple of rounds of fluffy tiramisu for the table, and actively entertain the fantasy. I think Brutto is the best place in London to do that.
I paid for this visit.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. It’s free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to support what we do, you can do so here. To receive Dining Out directly to your inbox, subscribe via the button below:
See you next week!