Osteria North Berwick
If you judged it on the basis of Italian restaurants in Scotland, you might never truly appreciate what Italian cooking, at its best, is all about.
I was reminded of this at Osteria, a trad Britalian restaurant in North Berwick. It had been heartily recommended; why, I’m not quite sure. It’s a blast from the past – and I don’t mean that as a nostalgic compliment.
Osteria is big on heavy sauces, with madeira or peppercorns, say, and very likely cream, flambé steak (haven't heard of that palaver for about two decades) and veal (with no mention of whether it is the indoor-reared, anaemic sort or the more ethical alternative). Even Emmenthal, a hot candidate for the world’s most boring, rubbery cheese, gets an outing.
I ate in Osteria shortly after I had come back from Sicily, and wanted to eat lightly to recalibrate my body after consuming too much cassata cake and cannoli. Just as well: the menu had the effect of shrinking my appetite because so little appealed. How very different it was from the food I had eaten only days before in Il Gallo e l’innamorata, an unassuming little trattoria in the back streets of Marsala.
Marsala, like North Berwick, is on the sea. It’s famous for fish and the eponymous fortified wine. In this family-run trattoria, the menu is just a vague indication of what you might eat. The front of house person basically tells you what’s on offer that day, asks you if you are feeling in the mood more for fish, or vegetables, then proceeds to bring out a succession of that day’s antipasti.
We ate warm salad of octopus on a potato and courgette puree, crisp rissoles of “neonate” (miniscule anchovies) with a salad of the island’s celebrated Pachino tomatoes, squid stewed in an intense tomato and wine sugo and hand-rolled pasta curls with wild asparagus, smoky pancetta and emollient ground pistachios from Bronte – another Sicilian speciality. All that, some tree-ripe blood oranges, lightly caramelised, more of the addictive cassatta made with ewe’s milk ricotta, good wine and service, and it cost £40 – and that’s at the current abysmal sterling-euro exchange rate.
Back in North Berwick, our bill came to a moderate (for the UK) £60, but that was because I ate two starters, since so few of the secondi (our equivalent of main courses) appealed, and we only drank one glass of wine. The wines are worth exploring though, a thorough cross-section of regions are featured, including the less encountered Marche, Lazio and Umbria, at different price levels.
A “primi” of wild mushroom risotto got the rice bit right – nicely firm – but the mushrooms had next to no flavour and it was too salty, tasting as though a commercial stock cube had been used. Aubergine “alla Mediterranea” was a lazy offering, consisting of a slipper of under-seasoned, vapid aubergine, topped with what seemed to be tinned tomatoes and two discs of rather unyielding, workaday mozzarella.
Then came the “pan fried squid”: white rings that looked as though they had been flashed under a grill, or baked briefly in a vaguely piquant tomato sauce. At least it was preferable to the anodyne veal escalope stuffed with cured ham, sitting in another nondescript salty sauce.
Still, this is clearly the type of food that finds favour with the golfing, Pringled middle classes of well-heeled East Lothian. Osteria is a small place, certainly, but it was going like a fair. However, it had me looking at my watch, wondering how soon we could check out the desserts and go. It took too long, largely because we were wedged in next to two tables of eight and another of 10. The noise was deafening and the service seized up. You can see why some restaurants won’t accept bookings for more than six people.
The puddings, when they did arrive, didn’t merit the wait. A bland and anonymous-tasting amaretto semifreddo came with a spoonful of chopped-up dried apricot, standing in for the promised “apricot compote”, and an over-cooked, and therefore too solid, orange crème brulée. Italian food? Of a sort, I suppose.