Dining Out 018: Theo's
Lunch in Camberwell.
This week I am continuing with a couple of themes that I have established in Dining Out over recent weeks – the first is “pizza”, following on from last week when I talked a bit about one of my current favourites in the city, and the second is “desperately doing things to convince my brain that I am in the south of Italy rather than the south of London”.
Finally the weather has caught up with my obsession with what I will call “holiday behaviour”* and last weekend felt like a real turning point. The sun came out, people outside the pub got more explicitly sunburned, and I suddenly developed a disease whereby I couldn’t stop ordering white wine spritzers. Summer, finally.
Like most people, my thoughts on both what and how I want to eat are almost entirely governed by what is happening outside. Obviously, because of the endless march of the seasons, there are particular foods and ingredients we associate mostly with certain times of year (right now I want to eat peaches at every meal, for example). But more than that, as soon as the temperature hits 26 degrees, I have some very specific preferences:
– I want to be sitting at a table in a garden;
– ideally under a shade of some kind (the shade should shield me from the direct sunlight but it should not make me feel cold);
– with a drink which has the word “spritz” in its name in my hand;
– and I want to be wearing sunglasses;
– I want to be feeling good in whatever outfit I have chosen to wear;
– I’d ideally like to be picking from a bowl of olives and a plate of charcuterie.
Places where these things are all possible are reasonably thin on the ground in my local area, but thankfully, the garden of Theo’s in Camberwell was open for business, so that’s where I headed for a late Sunday lunch.
Last week, I wrote a bit about how London’s pizza “scene” has changed in recent years. Where the softer, squishier Neapolitan style used to be everywhere, a crisper, more New York-influenced style has crept in over the past few years. The dominance of the Neapolitan style feels like it came largely thanks to the prevalence in the 2010s of pizza places like Franco Manca and Pizza Pilgrims, and as such, because of the rapid expansion of these chains, smaller (and cooler) alternatives like Theo’s always felt like they offered something different, even if their style of pizza wasn’t actually dissimilar.
Theo’s is an Italian pizzeria – you can order a proper spritz, you can eat tiramisu, and you’re not strictly meant to have mozzarella on the anchovy pizza. I really like that commitment to pizza as an Italian food (you lose this at the chains I mention), and I think it comes through in the atmosphere of the place, which is sleek and cool but ultimately still pretty relaxed. In the garden, we sat down under a wooden awning with grapevines growing over it, and I took the short sleeved overshirt I was wearing off. I immediately asked for a Cynar spritz, and it was served to me in a cold, squat glass. Holiday behaviour.
Food-wise, we ordered olives and a sharing plate which featured pistachio mortadella, crescentine (little bites of deep fried dough) and guindilla chillies, and then a couple of pizzas – one with salami and one with aubergine and pecorino.
The highlight was, undoubtedly, that sharing plate. Maybe that was because of the weather – picky bits and the sun are a true marriage, after all. Maybe it’s because of the tactile nature of those crescentine, and how pleasurable it feels to pick up piggy slices of mortadella in your hand, and stuff ribbons of it between crispy-then-soft dough pillows, dipping it all in scolding, bright red chilli oil before you eat it. It was a simple plate, but a well-balanced one, featuring good ingredients which paired interestingly with each other. I’ve thought about it a lot since, when I’ve been cutting about in the sun, thinking about the idyll of that little garden. I’d like to eat it again, certainly.
The pizza was a bit more of a mixed bag. I want to be clear in saying that I think the recent advent of Big Crispy Bottom has resulted in a bit of unnecessary dismissal of Neapolitan pizza, though the occasional sogginess of that style can definitely be frustrating. There was a bit of that sogginess – wetness, almost – when it came to these pizzas. The base was too thin in places to support the moisture from the toppings on the salami pie, for example, which was a shame considering the quality and thoughtfulness of the toppings (I found myself involuntarily forking up chunks of cheese and wood oven-baked aubergine, for example, long after I was actually full).
Don’t get me wrong: while the texture was a bit disappointing, and while I’m certainly happy to see a new type of pizza that seems to prize crispness emerging across the city more commonly, it was ultimately not really the pizza that was ever going to be the most memorable aspect of this particular meal for me. I had something specific on the brain, and so when I think about Theo’s, I will think about the sun, the cold spritz, the grapevines overhead, and the drinks we had afterwards on a hot Sunday afternoon as the heat made the air feel honeyed. I’ll be back, I think – for more picky bits, and more holiday behaviour.
* When I worked at VICE we had a joke about what we called “heatwave behaviour” which was basically a catch-all term for the slightly deranged shit people do when they get too warm – stuff like working on your laptop with your legs hanging out of your upstairs window, or telling everyone that wetting your t-shirt before putting it on “does actually work”. Holiday behaviour is similar: suddenly “lunch” translates as “big bag of olive oil crisps and two fags”, and you are drinking Fanta Limon like it’s water despite not touching the stuff when you’re at home. And because I have no holidays to speak of lined up, I have, as Dining Out readers may know, been doing holiday behaviour – knocking about in Crocs, wearing a bikini top under my t-shirt instead of a bra even though I haven’t been near a pool in about a year – in Peckham, I suppose as a bit of a subliminal experiment in trying to enter holiday mode without actually going on one.
I paid for this visit.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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