Dining Out 031: Trentina

Lunch in Birmingham.

I love eating in London, obviously, because I write a weekly newsletter about doing exactly that, but of course I am not from London so most of my formative food memories – learning how to make meatballs in my dad’s kitchen; getting a sandwich bigger than my head every weekend from Baguette du Monde (RIP); Big John’s drive thru; Torino’z Pizza – actually took place in Birmingham, which is where I was born and grew up. 

I think Birmingham gets a bit of a bad rap because a) everyone hates the accent and b) when it comes to large UK cities outside of the capital, people just prefer Manchester. I am, however, always inclined to stick up for Birmingham. The industrial architecture is very beautiful, its history and people are inextricable from immigration, meaning there is real and true diversity in the bones of the place, the pubs are elite if you know where you’re going, and crucially for our purposes here, the food “scene” (ugh) is popping – there’s world-beating curry of course, but also really great Vietnamese food, pizza, bakeries and lots besides. 

I was back seeing family last weekend, so I was keen to have a look at what the restaurants were saying while I was there. And when I asked on Instagram where I should be eating, there was a clear number one that came up in basically everyone’s answers: Trentina, a pasta place just outside of the city centre, in the Jewellery Quarter. 

The deal at Trentina is pretty simple – the menu consists of a selection of sharing plates in the starters section and then there is a list of fresh pasta dishes, which you could share, though they come as a pretty decent-sized individual portion. The combinations are a mix of classic and creative – there’s a clam, chilli and garlic dish, and squash and sage tortellini*, you know, but there’s also a fennel and white bean gigli option, and a spaghettini with nduja and earthy cavolo nero. It felt like a considered selection, and I liked the variety, and the emphasis on seasonal vegetarian ingredients: squash, sweet potato and brassicas were all much more prominent than, say, tomatoes or meat. 

On the whole, Trentina does exist in the vein of restaurants in London doing similar stuff – it probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for places like Bancoñe and Padella – but the main difference, I thought, was the atmosphere. I got lucky on the day I visited: when I walked in, the autumn sunshine was pouring in through a big window right at the front, and the room itself was smaller and more homely than I was expecting – you could see right into the little kitchen from where I was sitting. Essentially, there’s a comfort and a chillness at Trentina that you don’t really get at its London counterparts (which often feel like they’re stiffing you on the portions and trying to get you out within about 90 minutes or less), which feels a lot more in keeping with like, the laid-back, languid spirit of pasta as a food. 

When it came to ordering, eventually we landed on a three for £12 situation on focaccia, olive tapenade and Nocellara olives between four of us, and as a main, I chose mafaldine, sofrito, leeks and pork shoulder, which felt like it would be a warming fit for the crispness of the weather. 

As the starters were served, the real standout was the olive tapenade, which usually wouldn’t be something I’d pay a huge amount of attention to. It came heaped in a bowl and though we all spread it politely over our slices of focaccia (pretty good but I personally prefer it much squishier on the inside), I think every single person at the table would have commandeered the spoon and eaten scoops of it if left to their own devices. It was great: the texture of the olives just chunky enough, the taste of them just on the right side of bitter, finished off with a glossy oil to make it all adhere. 

Mains-wise, I absolutely wolfed the pork shoulder dish, which was essentially served as a tomato-less ragu – there was a sofrito with carrot, plus a little leek, and then that roasted pork shoulder, tossed through thick ribbons of mafaldine. It felt understated and, as a result, really confident: the type of rich sauce that you might expect on a plate like this wasn’t required, because when the meat is that stringy and moist, it’s better to simply let it speak for itself. The pasta was fresh, too, and had plenty of bite to contrast with the softness of the pork. 

I love cooking like this, which prioritises a few ingredients and does its very best with them – adding tomatoes to this dish, for example, would have felt like too much, cloaking the gentle but definite flavours that were happening otherwise. My dessert followed the same kind of maxim – it was just vanilla soft serve (incapable of not ordering it when it’s on the menu) with a sharp, sour syrup of amareno cherries, and it was perfect. Sweet but in a complicated way, kind of palate-cleansing, lovely in the autumn afternoon sun.

In general, I’d say that Trentina is a bit of a Platonic ideal of its type of casual-ish pasta restaurant. The dishes were clever and almost sparse, to allow the right flavours to shine, the ambience was relaxed (rather than the natural stressfulness that comes with the big “I have just waited outside with a buzzer for one hour to sit and eat cacio e pepe while touching elbows with someone else” vibe of the London equivalents; I’m usually the first to defend “the buzz of the capital” but this is one exception where a bit of calm was appreciated), and the space itself wasn’t overly fussy, but it was comfortable. A good place to linger a little bit, I thought. 

* I would have ordered this if getting stuffed pasta as a main course in a restaurant wasn’t the move of someone that wants to go home extremely hungry. Why is this a thing? It happens absolutely every time. Why do restaurants simply not add more pieces of pasta to the dish? I will pay for them!

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, 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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