Dining Out 053: Daroco

Lunch in Soho. Also: one whole year of Dining Out.

I have some VIP (Very Important Pizza) to tell you about this week, but before I get to that, I hope you’ll allow me a bit of self-indulgence – unusual for this newsletter I know.

Today marks a year since I started Dining Out, which is a mad milestone. That means that I have written an entry once a week, every week, for a calendar year. I am not sure I have ever stuck at something so consistently in my life, and I am amazed at the fact that a little challenge I set for myself just after I turned 30, because I was frustrated and bored and I felt like my writing was going to shit, is now something I share with, literally, thousands of people.

Over the last 12 months, Dining Out has followed me to salad bars, steakhouses, impossibly fancy restaurants where they serve like 15 courses, bakeries (and bakery queues), supper clubs, New York, Amsterdam, the World Darts Championships, and loads of other places besides. I hope you’ve found it an interesting or entertaining account of some aspects of the sometimes weird, sometimes shit, sometimes amazing, and always fascinating contemporary restaurant landscape.

It’s been fun trying to keep up with all of that, of course, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that really, the most important thing about the newsletter for me is that most of the entries are about eating with people I care about. How precious to have a record of a whole year’s worth of those moments, and how precious to have so many more to look forward to.

As such, I did just want to take a second this week to thank anyone who has grabbed dinner or lunch with me at any point over the last year. I am very grateful for your patience, encouragement, and saint-like willingness to sit through my diabolical photo-taking. I am also, obviously, deeply indebted to Lucy Letherland, who lights these entries up with her wit and talent every single week: thank you for your partnership, and for making Dining Out what it is.

Finally, thanks to you for reading it and for subscribing. It is the delight of my rotten little life to write it and I am so happy that anyone at all likes it. Thank you thank you thank you <3

Alright, enough of that, sorry. Onto Year Two, starting with this pizza I’ve promised you.

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While Neapolitan pizza – the Italian style, often done on sourdough, with soft, springy crusts – is certainly the type of pizza you will still probably find most commonly in London, thanks to chains like Franco Manca and Pizza Pilgrims, it is, admittedly, not cool.

Instead right now, everyone goes wild about London’s more New York-influenced pizza – the big slices available at Gordo’s, the stracciatella-splattered thin-n-crispies at Dough Hands, and, obviously, Crisp – as well as its bakery-style pies, like the ones at Chatsworth Bakehouse and Breadstall in Soho.

But [Lady Gaga voice] as an Italian girl, I have to say that Neapolitan pizza, when it’s done well (and it’s often not, let’s be honest), very much still has its place. It’s a Sunday of a pizza – it’s cosy, and more comforting than other styles, more pliant. It lands with a soft, satisfying thud in your stomach. And at Daroco, an upmarket Italian restaurant near Tottenham Court Road, where I had lunch last weekend, this is the type of Neapolian pizza they deal in. Hell yeah.

Daroco is quite an imposing place. It’s really big! Tables are set in front of a large bar, which is where the pizza oven (encrusted with ceramic butterflies all over) also lives, and the outside of the room is tiled in turquoise – this gives the effect of what you might expect if Ursula from The Little Mermaid did an Architectural Digest tour of her abode, decor-wise, at least. In terms of the light, it’s bright and inviting, and in the sunshine, it’s certainly a nice place to pass an hour or two for lunch. I believe they do also do bottomless brunch – can I have an “oi oi” in the chat please – but it was reasonably quiet when we showed up at around 1:30PM, possibly due to the fact that the place is basically surrounded by other restaurants.

We were shown to our table – a cosy velvet booth, right in front of the pizza oven – by our server, and our order was taken pretty swiftly. We chose leek and Scamorza arancini, and a plate of cured meats – salami, Prosciutto and mortadella – to begin. Both were nailed on: the outside crunch of the arancini gave way to puddles of melted cheese, which is really what you are asking for when you ask for arancini, and the meat plate was pretty varied – though some bread to accompany it wouldn’t have gone amiss.

On my way into Soho, I’d been fully planning to order a big massive pasta as is my usual wont, but as soon as I saw pizzas being shovelled out of the wood oven, their thick, pillowy crusts oiled up like the manes of show ponies, I knew that I would have to change my stance entirely.

I’ve been absolutely nuts for pesto recently (it’s giving uni kitchen, I don’t know what else to tell you), so upon seeing that there was a summery, tasty-sounding pizza on the menu with a fresh basil pesto base, roasted tomatoes, and stracciatella, my mind was firmly made up.

It was absolutely huge, obviously, and the flavours were dead on. The roasted tomatoes gave exactly the sweet, acidic whack that the mild pesto base and blank canvas of the cheese needed, and the dough held up well under it all, folding nicely in on itself, but never quite collapsing, which is the sweet spot.

Of course, this being an authentic Italian, there was nothing so sacreligious as a dip for the slightly charred, airy crusts, even though such a thing would, as the old adage goes “do bits” (I’d honestly have paid you a tenner if you’d offered me a pot of garlic mayo when I was nearing the end of the meal, with crusts to spare) – but even so, it was a great pizza experience, which reminded me of all the great things about the Neapolitan style.

If you’re interested in trying one of these things for yourself, you will cough up handsomely for the privilege – a pizza at Daroco will easily set you back £20 – so it’s probably a payday treat, or one for when your dad forgets your birthday. If you do find yourself quids in, and hankering for soft, chewy dough, fresh, vibrant toppings, and a very generous serving of Prosecco in central London, though, this could be a good bet.

This visit was gifted but the thoughts are my own and I must bear them daily.

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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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