Eating out

Essenza (Italian)

We Brits have an extraordinary way of contorting foreign cuisines. Balti, chop suey, doner kebabs… dishes unrecognisable in their homelands that somehow tickle our national palate.

Take dear old spag bol. The Italians would never contemplate the idea. Not that they don’t eat spaghetti: of course they do, with a tomato sauce, perhaps, or with pesto. They also make a meat sauce – ragù – which is served with pasta. Just not with spaghetti. It doesn’t work. As a dish, it has a basic design fault: the sauce falls off the slippery strands and ends up in a puddle on the plate. Fettuccine, tagliatelle, pappardelle, even penne… but not spaghetti. Quite how it became the British idea of an Italian dish is hard to fathom.

At Essenza, one of the three Italian joints on Kensington Park Road owned and run by the same family (Osteria Basilico and Mediterraneo are the others), they serve ragù alla bolognese properly, with fettuccine. The recipe also includes a generous helping of sliced porcini: those eco-friendly souls who worry about mushroom miles will be disappointed to learn that they come from South Africa at this time of year, but they have a texture and gentle fragrance that the dried variety lacks.

The fettuccine bolognese may be thoroughly Italian, but a starter of battered squid rings and prawns (two prawns, actually) could have been from any culture’s deep fryer, especially with its accompanying dish of what seemed suspiciously like bottled Thai sweet chilli sauce. The squid was rubber-band tough, and the owner graciously took it off the bill.

My starter of mussels and clams, gratifyingly spiked with unseasonal basil and fresh tomato, was much better, starring sweet, plump molluscs and an ethereally light, fragrant broth, mopped up with a wedge of rustic toast: and, when it arrived (rather bafflingly) just before we finished our starters, a basket of bread.

Fortunes were reversed for the main courses: my friend had the excellent fettuccine, while I had a slightly dreary osso buco alla milanese, which would have been better had the traditional topping of gremolada (parsley, garlic and lemon zest) not been absent. The classic, saffron-gold risotto was well-made, and hollowing out the marrow was as much fun as ever: osso buco is one of the few dishes that rewards the diner with a complimentary napkin ring.

We drank a fine bottle of Morellino di Scansano, from the trendy bit of coastal Tuscany that was once a malarial swamp, and polished off a tiramisu which would have benefited from a more generous hand with the booze.

Essenza is not especially cheap, but it is friendly and the food is – for the most part – very good, especially the homemade pasta. I cannot see ‘fett bol’ supplanting its bastard cousin in British affections, but Essenza makes a case for it. Bill Knott

Dinner for two with wine, around £90

Essenza, 210 Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, W11 1NR
020 7792 1066