FROM THE 80’S WITH LOVE
Some days you just don’t feel like cooking, you don’t have any inspiration, didn’t remember to defrost meat (shhh... don’t tell anybody I don’t buy fresh meat from the butcher every day), or you simply feel like getting out of home and eating simple, quick and cheap food. Exactly for this kind of situations it’s good to have restaurants with good food, that are close to home and you don’t need to think too much or take a look at the bank account before you leave home. Last Saturday was such a day.
12:30: Going for lunch with friends, they promised an Italian that won’t disappoint me. we shall see...
14:00: In Golders Green, the ‘iconic’ Jewish/Israeli area of London.
The restaurant in question is ‘L’Artista’ – an Italian place that by the looks of it reminds me of a well-known and much-loved meat eatery back home where the cook/grillman/waiter/owner grunts at me asking if I want one or two skewers and that the pitta breads are in the box near the fridge where the drinks are. ‘L’Artista’ is under the train bridge (just like eateries back home that are located in gas stations) so we choose to sit in the closed terrace – otherwise, our friend warns us, every time the train passes over, the food ‘dances’ in our plates and the noise is unbearable! So, we’ll sit in the terrace, where we can enjoy fresh air and less noise that becomes louder in closed spaces.
14:05: a bit shocked by the number of different dishes on the menu...
According to an unwritten law, if you see many different dishes in the menu, you need to re-consider staying at the restaurant, and if the menu includes pictures than it’s time to run away! Luckily this time there are no pictures and I’m trying to convince myself that the food must be good, since our friends know who they’re dealing with (me). The menu includes a generous range of warm and cold starters, followed by pastas, pizzas, and meaty main courses. The main impression is being easily confused and not knowing what we really feel like ordering.
We decided to share 3 starters and take a main for each, and gave up on the wine since yesterday was our friend’s birthday and we had enough drinks at his party for several days – there’s nothing like water, nature’s own champagne, directly from the tap...
There’s a whole show at this small Italian eatery here in North London when they bring the food to the table. Not only I kept everybody from eating because I need to take pictures (for you my dear readers) but the team of waiters surrounded the table with lovely Italian heartiness and suggested black pepper, more drinks, and just in general does anybody require anything else. Additionally, someone whispered in my ear that if you tell the waiter that someone from your table has a birthday, they kick off a whole party at the restaurant: all the waiters will go on a parade including music and crashing pots and pans and singing ‘happy birthday’ in a heavy Italian accent. I wanted so much to tell the waiter that both me and our friend had our birthdays earlier this week... I love those things so much but I felt merciful for my friend who was still in a slight state of intoxication from last night J In order to console myself I conjured a shared memory between me and my friends from a few years ago when we went to a place in Tel Aviv where the bartenders climb on top of the bar and dance to an Oriental-tuned ‘happy birthday’ melody... hilarious!
14:30: Starters are here... they’re huge – definitely good value for money and it’s good that we decided to share.
Our first course, Antipasti Italiano, turned out to be a plate full of top-class charcuterie (not kosher), olives, gherkins, and mini onions (7.20£). It was spot on and we finished it almost as quickly as it arrived to our table. We also ordered the Insalata Primavera – slices of Italian bread with melted goat cheese and green salad with dried tomatoes (6.80£). Maybe the bread could’ve been a bit more special, but the cheese made up to it, with a delicate taste that left us happy. The third starter we ordered was Tricolore, a simple plate of slices of tomato, avocado and mozzarella. I don’t have that much to say about this dish – because it was just slices of vegetables, but the mozzarella, for a change, had a taste, as opposed to mozzarella you buy at random from the supermarket or get at restaurants that don’t really care about their customers, where it tastes mostly like water with only a little bit of texture.
15:00: The waiters march proudly bearing our mains.
Everybody except for me ordered pastas, while I went for a veal escalope in bread crumbs. There are several reasons I don’t tend to order pasta at Italian restaurants: 1) They always serve you a mountain of pasta and I don’t know how to deal with the size of it, so more than half the portion goes to the bin. 2) After I travelled in Italy I realized that real pasta can be found only in Italy: pasta is supposed to be a day-to-day cheap dish (if you go by the Italian tradition), only in restaurants, it seems they often forget about this ‘principle of simplicity’, so either they inflate the price or the end result is not something.
Anyway, as the mains arrived to the table, two waiters popped up again (after the parade I mentioned before). One of them was skinny and had a pepper grounder, and the other was a chubby fellow who held a grader and a piece of parmesan cheese. We all indulged in the final touch and got on with the eating. My beloved ordered pasta carbonara (£6.60), that wasn’t very impressive except for the size of the portion. The bacon wasn’t crispy enough and the pasta was cooked a few minutes too much... (another reason I don’t like having pasta in restaurants).
GD also got a mountain of pasta in cream sauce, Tagliatelle al Salmon (£7.70). Judging by the way his plate was clean after the fact it seems that it was tasty, since the portion was very big, so if he managed to finish it, it means he was very very hungry (or had a lot of drinks last night).
From the moment we took our seats MD announced her intention to order what ended up being the best dish on our table, Tagliatelle Verdi ai Broccoli (£7.20) – a green dish with a lot of veg, some chilli and light olive oil that doesn’t make you feel terribly guilty like cream sauce would. Her dish impressed me mainly because the pasta was well-made (‘al dente’) – not too cooked and with an interesting taste you don’t meet at every average Italian restaurant.
The veal escalope I ordered (£9.10) didn’t rock my world. It was good, almost as big as the plate (and that was big), but I have a feeling the meat wasn’t the freshest in the world and that they didn’t really put too much effort into the seasoning of the bread crumbs crust. I was disappointed that the escalope was lonely in the big plate (although it filled the whole of it) except for 2 pieces of lettuce and a slice of tomato – maybe I expect too much, and maybe it was a mistake not to ask if it comes with a side-dish, or maybe it was the waiter’s fault? Having an escalope is alright, but what about some mashed potatoes to go with it or something like that? The dish was OK... but I don’t believe I’ll order this again, sorry to say that.
15:45: Remember I wrote earlier about restaurants where you need to simply get up and leave if you see pictures in the menu? So now we reached desserts. The desserts menu reminded us the Brighton seafront – both colourful and cheesy at the same time, with all the dodgy ornaments and constructions they created around the ice-creams and the banana split... a bit weird.
While trying to fight the time machine and understand how we got thrown back to the early eighties all of a sudden (I was almost worried that my calf warmers will get wet and expected Cindy Lauper to come through my walkman headphones when I realized I have none at the moment), we ordered a cake called Banoffie Cake (£3.90). In the fancy menu the cake was presented in a very authentic-looking terracotta bowl, and the name of the dish called up good stories of guys who came back from India and tried to reconstruct the taste of Goa. Additionally we ordered cream profiteroles with chocolate sauce (£3.90). Let’s put it this way: this wasn’t a huge success for the sweet department, it wasn’t worth the calories or the price. The Banoffie cake saw better days, and the profiteroles seemed to be an attempt by the restaurant to get rid of their stock of cream left out from the times when ‘creaming’ food was in vogue (the eighties again). It would’ve been better had we stayed with the taste of the mains rather than the dessert. Luckily the espresso was very good (better than many places in London that don’t really excel in this area)!
To summarize, if you ignore my snipes, the place is very good for informal meals, families with kids, and especially if you feel like eating quickly for a good price. I think I will return to this place, only the next time I will announce that somebody has a birthday (just for the laughs), and I will have my dessert in a place that belongs to the new millennium.
915-917 Finchley Road
Golders Green
London
NW11 7PE
020-87317501
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