Dining Out 033: Officina 00
Dinner in Shoreditch.
I love dinners of all kinds – solo dinners, dinner dates, dinner catch-ups, even work dinners have their place – but I have to say that my favourite type is, on balance, a birthday dinner. This is really just because of the abandon that comes with this type of occasion, and I like any excuse for abandon. Do I want a cocktail? A pudding? A stupid tiny “snack” at the start? Yes, bring me all of it! For it is the glorious birthdate of my sweet friend, the anniversary of the day they first graced the planet and made it exponentially more lovely in the process! I want all of the delicacies and libations available to me for the most decorative marking of this auspicious day! And so on, and so on.
I mention this because last weekend, my friend Hayley had a birthday dinner, which was essentially an excuse to get around a table with eight pals, say “woooo” a lot when cheersing, and celebrate her via the medium of pasta, at Officina 00 in Old Street.
Officina 00 is quite a slinky little spot – dark, glossy, wooden tables, black walls – with another branch in Fitzrovia too. On the Saturday night when we showed up, the clientele generally seemed to be people in their 20s and 30s, mostly on dates or in groups like ours. The place is a pasta restaurant which leans slightly more experimental than a lot of its peers: handmade casarecce comes with of-the-moment pistachio pesto and yuzukoshu; there’s pheasant and rabbit on the menu, though you might expect a place like of this ilk to deal more in chilli and crab linguine and cacio e pepe. It’s a nice surprise, and underlines the adventurous, chuck-it-all-at-the-wall Actual Italianness of the place. Obviously there’s a received stereotype about Italians and classical cooking, but in practice I think there’s a difference between Italian chefs’ contemporary approaches, and the UK’s slightly more reserved and sometimes over-reverent lens on the cuisine.
After grabbing a couple of bottles of house white (Custoza Bianco from Veneto – really drinkable and delicious! Fruity but undercut by a nuttiness. I liked it!) and toasting to the birthday girl (more wooing), we went about the business of ordering. First on the list was something called a “fried raviolo” from the snacks list, which of course everyone wanted – hard not to want fried raviolo init – so we all went for a serving each.
This came to the table as a single dainty piece of pasta for every person, crisp on the outside and filled with a sort of cacio e pepe paste whose bombastic flavour I really didn’t expect, based on how small and cute the raviolo was. The texture was almost pastry-like and the filling was an immediate hit of strong Pecorino and black pepper – cacio e pepe to the nth degree. So while one piece of pasta per wine glass wielding ironic Boomerang creator may have initially felt like a rough deal, it was actually the perfect amount given the very indulgent feeling of the dish.
Mains-wise, I had been jonesing for something aggressively autumnal all day, so when I got hold of the menu and saw both a pumpkin gnocchi and a rabbit lasagna with smoked Scamorza, I was faced with a real Sophie’s Choice, which I complained about loudly for about ten minutes (indeed, when you have to choose between two menu items you really want, that’s actually known as a Lauren’s Choice.)
Thankfully, my moaning eventually cracked my dear friend Imogen, who offered to share both dishes with me. Now I am usually not someone who condones twos on plates of pasta – it’s a personal food, best enjoyed via the medium of a deep but full and steaming bowl with one fork only – but I was so plagued by indecision on this occasion that I did really have to accept this act of Mother Teresa-level kindness.
Often when you order two things, you go into it in the knowledge that one, though you’re not sure which, will inevitably be better than the other and will, therefore, have been the Correct Order (this is also similar to when you’re having dinner with one other person and you each order a main course – the food comes to the table and you both immediately know who has Won the meal). But here at Officina 00, it seemed that there wasn’t really a correct order. Around me, my friends were laying into plates of pappardelle with beef ragu and meatballs (huge respect for this) and servings of giant egg yolk raviolo, glistening with buttery glaze. My eyes were bulging out of my head as though I were being throttled by Homer Simpson every time I saw a new dish, and when my own food came, there was no clear champ there either – instead, these two cosy dishes that I couldn’t choose between just complimented each other.
The lasagna was a slim, stylish slice rather than a thick wedge, which would have been a thumbs down from me, but the requisite crispy corners and melting cheese were present and correct. The rabbit, as I’d suspected, was an ideal filling – the gaminess gave it exactly the richness you crave as soon as it starts getting dark at like, 4PM. Shredded and then stewed in a tomato sauce, it made for a really substantial – but not overpowering – layer in the dish.
If pushed I’d probably say that the gnocchi was my favourite of the two, but I don’t know whether I’d have enjoyed it as much if I didn’t have the depth of the lasagna to offset the sweetness of little pillows of pumpkin, drowned in brown butter, with crispy sage and a loose, aerated gorgonzola “foam” spooned across the top, dialling down the pungent blue cheese flavour. If I’m splitting hairs, I’d have liked to see the gnocchi browned a little on the outside, and I happen to love the funk of gorgonzola personally, so I’ll take as much of it as possible – but these tiny gripes aside, it was a generous plate, with just enough of a riff on classic ingredient combinations to feel both exciting and familiar.
Of course, this was a birthday dins, so dessert was a no brainer, and as soon as I’d seen the word “profiteroles” on the menu two minutes after sitting down, there was no possible universe wherein that was not my order. I fucking love profiteroles – my current death row dessert choice would probably be a 12 profiterole stack from M&S* – and I’ve been glad to see them, and choux pastry in general, popping up more and more on dessert menus recently.
I feel like they were a bit maligned for a while – thought of as too tacky, too Iceland to be a restaurant dish. But just as Vienetta, black forest gateaux, sundaes, and jelly and ice cream have all had their comebacks, embraced and jazzed up by chefs who loved them as kids, profiteroles are having their day in the sun now. It goes without saying that the Officina version slapped: one ‘role slathered in chocolate sauce, and another in a sort of lemon cream that I can only really describe as tasting “very Italian” – you either know exactly what I mean or you don’t.
Altogether, my meal – fried raviolo, a share of some olives, half of two pastas, half a profiteroles, and my portion of the wine for the table – came to £42, including service, which, for how I came away feeling, was great value. The food had been genuinely tasty, flavoursome, and surprising – and while I love a birthday dinner regardless, this was an especially good one. Congrats to Hayley for both being born (very pleased about that) and for choosing a real banger of a pasta place.
* Starter: garlic pizza bread; main: Brutto penne alla vodka.
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, 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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I now really want profiteroles x