They Say
‘Gino’s first Luciano restaurant can be found at the ME London on The Strand in the heart of London’s West End. Luciano by Gino D’Acampo provides guests with luxury Italian dining all day every day, serving lunch, dinner and drinks, until late.
The menu, designed by Gino and his team of talented development chefs, perfectly befits this prestigious location. Incorporating classic Italian dishes with a focus on quality and ingredient provenance. An authentic Italian service complements the menu, adding to the premium yet informal dining experience.’
The Style
We enter the ME hotel, which is in a great location, right on the Aldwych, with high hopes for the evening ahead. It has been a sunny day, the first in May after a very long winter, and having looked at the menu in advance, I am looking forward to having linguine alle vongole on the terrace. Sadly by 8pm, it’s freezing again, and the preponderance of buses on this particular thoroughfare puts paid to any notion of dining al fresco among the fumes. Still, we are still in high spirits as we enter the buzzy, bustling restaurant.
It is quite a corporate space, but very prettily decorated, with turquoise wallpaper decorated with an oriental floral birdlife motif and large, arched windows with banquettes upholstered in plain turquoise fabric backing into the arches. The carpet has a blue and white trellis pattern, tables are dressed with white linen and gleaming glassware under low hanging pendant lights. The loos are wallpapered in pink with the same floral and bird motif as the dining room. 1950s Italian music plays quietly. Overall, it’s a pleasing atmosphere, light and airy and as I said, buzzing for a restaurant that’s only been open for about a month.
Our waiter confirms that it’s been busy all day, a situation that can be explained partly by the fact that we can see at least five West End shows from the hotel doorway. It’s very popular, he further confirms, both pre- and post-theatre.
The Crowd
There are lot of men in suits and women optimistically dressed in smart summer dresses and heels. At the table to our left sit three guys in business suits having an animated conversation about politics. After some unsubtle eavesdropping it becomes apparent they’re lawyers from the nearby Inns of Court. Their conversation ranges from Liz Truss and mortgage increases (vehement) to Idi Amin and international history (fascinating). With difficulty I drag myself away and turn my attention to the rest of the room. A large Italian family, ranging from ‘Nonna’ and ‘Nonno’ to ‘Mamma’, ‘Papa’ and ‘Bambini’ occupy one central table. Elsewhere the usual West End punters chat happily over food and drinks.
The Food
From the vast menu, 12 pages in total (including drinks), I order carpaccio di manzo (£20) and linguine alle vongole (£26.50), Andy tartara di tonno (£18) followed by pollo ripieno di mozzarella (£24.75). Here lies the first disappointment of the evening: they’ve run out of vongole. It is actually my favourite dish in the whole world, but I shrug good-naturedly: it’s been a long, sunny day, the kitchen’s been busy – I’ll go for the ravioli con gamberi rossi (£23) instead.
The starters are spot on, my carpaccio so thinly cut it’s practically translucent and melt-in-the-mouth tender. It comes with a Venetian dressing, pecorino Romano & wild rocket, all tasty, incredibly fresh, the entire dish in fact delicious. Andy’s in equal raptures over his tuna tartare, actually ‘spicy line caught yellowfin tuna tartare with a slow cooked egg yolk & crisp Sardinian flatbread’ raving about its spanking freshness and the fantastic combination of flavours. Greedily, neither of us wants to share a single mouthful.
There’s quite a long wait between courses, but the restaurant is busy and we’re happy with our wine, eagerly anticipating what’s to come. I want to enjoy the main course, I really do, and in fact it’s OK. But that’s it really. Purporting to be ‘fresh filled pasta with wild red Sicilian prawns, garlic, chilli, cherry tomatoes & fresh basil’ it looks and tastes like Heinz tinned ravioli in tomato sauce. I actually like Heinz tinned ravioli, but it’s a bit disappointing after the great start to our meal – the pasta is far too thick, for a start.
It’s a similar situation with Andy’s chicken – described on the menu as ‘crispy chicken breast stuffed with mozzarella, semi-dried tomatoes & fresh basil pesto’, he says it’s nice enough but tastes ‘just like something you’d get at an Italian sandwich bar for lunch’. Maybe our expectations were too high after our sterling starters or maybe the kitchen was having an off day (it was very busy, and didn’t let up as the evening wore on – the constant flow provided by normal diners, then the post-theatre crowd, we assumed).
We go for ice cream to finish and very nice it is too, the pistachio scoop particularly pleasing, a pale nutty colour rather than the more usual synthetic pale green, with proper chunks of nut. The honeycomb and chocolate are delicious too. Suddenly it occurs to me that there is something very familiar about these flavours (there’s a choice between pistachio, chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, honeycomb and pannacotta) and I realise where I’ve had them before – at a pub lunch at my mum’s local the previous weekend. We ask a passing waitress and she confirms that the ice creams have been bought in. This is really not such a bad thing per se – I didn’t mind at my mum’s local, after all – but you’d think an Italian restaurant trading on the name of a celebrity chef would make its own dolce. On the other hand, this is part of a chain – there are other Gino d’Acampo restaurants in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle, so maybe it’s a bit much to be expecting homemade ice cream.
The Drink
We have a bottle of Pinot Grigio which slips down very nicely.
In a Nutshell
A great place for a night out but with patchy food. I notice that there is now a much shorter menu for ‘lunch and early evening’ and it might be better to order from this – maybe it’s just not possible to do so many things (and there is a lot of choice) to a high standard.
The Details
LUCIANO by Gino D’acampo, 336-337 The Strand, Aldwych, LONDON, WC2R 1HA
020 3793 0733
