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Vincaffe

Review published on 22/11/2004 © Sunday Herald

For all the nominally Italian restaurants that Scotland has, it has been almost impossible to have an eating experience akin to what you might find in Italy. It’s not just a question of getting the dishes right, it’s about how the whole meal is structured. The British want to shoehorn every gastronomic tradition into a three-course format. Your typical French meal would have four courses, including cheese. We offer cheese instead of dessert. The Italians favour even more courses.

You start with the antipasto, often a selection of small bites, which can sometimes seem like a meal in itself. Then there’s the primo, with pasta, soup or risotto; the secondo, generally meat or fish; contorno, vegetables or salads. After some combination of these, you go on to pudding or cheese.

What’s more, Italians are anarchistic. They don’t get bureaucratically upset if you skip a course, or eat one in place of the other. In Italy, it’s perfectly fine to order antipasti and primi, then decide what more you feel like, if anything, once you have eaten those. And this is what I love about Valvona & Crolla’s new Vincaffè in Edinburgh.

It lends itself to proper Italian eating. A dish is what it says it is and no messing. It stands or falls on its basic integrity. If you order, as we did, chargrilled marinated pork ribs, you get just that, a pile of ribs, refreshingly free of ornamental greenery and redundant piles of starch whose sole purpose is to pad out the plate. And when those focused dishes are as delicious as ours were, this is all you need to be perfectly satisfied.

I return, fondly, to those ribs. They offend against the Scottish restaurant status quo that customers will freak out at the sight of a bone and must be fed boring fillets and breasts. Yet the tastiest meat comes on the bone and these ribs were a perfect example, offering the creamiest of pork, succulent after its prolonged soak in olive oil, rosemary and garlic, its flavoursome fat crisped up and blackened by the grill. A finger-licking hands-on dish which found us fighting over the bones like hungry terriers.

And so to another antipasto, that Italian staple arancini or fried balls of risotto, one of the best finger foods on the planet. These were cleanly fried, oozing with emollient buffalo milk mozzarella and stippled with vivid green parsley.

Then we split a portion of taglierini with courgette and cream. That may sound boring until I tell you that the home-made pasta was consummately slippery and freshly eggy, the courgette just a minute or so past raw, the whole thing bound by reduced cream and freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano. In fact, it was another lick-the-plate job. And so on to a secondo of truly memorable squid, delicate violet-coloured tentacles and bouncy white rings tender under their ever-so-light, rustling batter.

That left room to return, retrospectively, to one of the antipasto options, a classic vitello tonnato. This was executed in the time-honoured way, with paper-thin slices of poached veal coated in a thick home-made mayonnaise that incorporates tuna, anchovies and capers. Done correctly, as this most definitely was, it is always a winner.

I cannot think of a more captivating pudding than the torta di pistacchio, a moist buttery cake dense with green pistachios. However, I think it is positively irresponsible to sell it to take away, downstairs in the café, where people like me have to walk by and try to resist its magnetic lure.

This place is also heaven on earth for Italophile wine buffs, too. Stunning wines by the bottle, marked up a restrained £5 on shop prices, plus legendary wines such as Sassicaia and Gaja’s Barbaresco by the glass, courtesy of a Cruvinet wine preserving machine.

Sunday Herald