Made In Italy

It might be surprising to hear that with regard to restaurants, authenticity is not a trait I eagerly seek. Having resigned myself to the disappointing truth that any food with a foreign designation eaten in the anglophone West is generally to be regarded as an imposter, I do not wish for my dinner to be “authentic”  - rather, I wish for it to be good. To elucidate, it is a well-distributed fact that “curry” consumed in this country bears little or no resemblance to the age-old creations enjoyed in India; the Bolognese do not, in fact, take their eponymous hearty sauce with spaghetti but with tagliatelle (this is a fine distinction, but the Italians are right: tagliatelle Bolognese far outstrips its Anglicised cousin). It is a crassly post-colonial reality that in British kitchens decrepit artefacts of foreign cultures can be unearthed, the desired qualities having been extracted and the rest discarded. Thus I relinquish to the tendency of food in Britain to yield to British tastes.

It seems, however, that the sole aim of Made In Italy is to contradict me in this assertion. At around 9pm young Italians arrive by the meretricious tableful. They come and they order pizza capricciosa (£7.40 for 10”), spaghetti carbonara (£4.40) and lasagne (£4.80) all on well-laden plates and all tasting exactly as one expects. The carbonara is seductively creamy with an eggy richness punctuated by interludes of salty, meaty pancetta. The capricciosa is festooned with Italianate ingredients—mozzarella, olives, tomatoes and prosciutto ham. The lasagne is equally predictable. Coffee comes in my favourite guise: cocoa dark, thickly oozing and shake-inducingly strong.

The food is at once of the sort which British tastes expect and which Italians enjoy with Mediterranean enthusiasm. The menu reads like an Anglo-American parody of Italian food. It is not resemblant of the food about which one reads in Antonio Carluccio or Sophia Loren, but the Italians do not seem to care. Perhaps, then, nor should I. After all, in a country such as our own authenticity is obsolescent; perfect prandial pleasure is instead the sought-for ideal. I humbly propose that Made In Italy serves as an inexpensive rest-stop on some junction heading towards such an ideal.