One summer while I was home from university I worked at my friend’s dad’s little Italian BYOB restaurant in southwest London. As well as serving up scrumptious and vastly portioned pizzas, bruschettas, pastas and risottos every evening, each morning it was a greasy spoon. You had your usual fare of fry-ups, omelettes and things on toast, but you could also get deep-fried pizza with tomato sauce, lasagna or cannelloni and chips.
Think: very British grub with a little Italian chef’s kiss. It’s a concept I’m familiar with, so when I heard about Cafe Britaly in Peckham, which celebrates “Britain’s love affair with Italian food”, I was intrigued. They – being Richard and Alex who have both worked at Bocca di Lupo as general manager and senior sous chef respectively – have put a little more thought into the idea of British and Italian fusion than simply adding chips to a dish.
The aim is to make “Italian dishes more British, and British dishes more Italian”. In some ways, there are echoes of the cafe I worked in all those years ago. It’s a small place, with tables packed closely together, the grease from the fryers escaping the open kitchen and cloaking the room in a familiar smokeyness, and there are things with chips on the menu.
One notable difference is staff are smiley, friendly and not at all grumpy. One of those “things with chips” is a fish finger sandwich – battered coley, tartare sauce, salsa rossa and rocket. With the lightly battered, cru.