ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX GREEN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Some restaurants are born under a lucky star. Motorino is one. Opened by the former lawyer Jonathan Downey and his on-off business partner, the chef Stevie Parle, mere months after they launched the extraordinarily buzzy Town in Covent Garden, this place can only succeed.
Parle and Downey have put Luke Ahearne, former head chef at the wildly successful Lita, in charge of the kitchen. The name is a nod to Parle’s old Italian restaurant Rotorino, which closed in 2018 after lukewarm reviews. It almost feels a kind of repudiation, like Tim Martin naming his pubs after Mr Wetherspoon, the geography teacher who told him he would never amount to anything.
Motorino looks a lot like Town: plenty of dark reds and greens, a big oval window into the kitchen. But it’s darker, more futuristic. The entrance is through one of those modern blocks that are so nondescript your eyes slide off them, then suddenly you’re in this other world, somewhere between a cruise ship and a spaceship. It’s as if someone searched “glamorous restaurant” on an interior design website and then clicked “Buy all”.
Everything here screams expertise, elegance. There are little touches that could raise it from good to great too: chief among them, the drinks list. To add to the sense of Avengers Assemble they’ve got Kevin Armstrong from Satan’s Whiskers — up there with my favourite cocktail bars in London — to design it. Alongside the main list of classic cocktails and newbies there are five types of Campari with different mixers, all priced at a fiver (we go for the orange juice). It’s a pleasingly hospitable, Italian touch.
Inside Motorino
MARK SCOTT
The wine list, however, winds me up. There’s a Douro listed as “Second-cheapest white”. I hate it when restaurants do this: forcing you to provide the punchline of their joke when you order something. Even worse when the punchline is that you, the customer, are a cheapskate who knows little about wine.
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But by the time I’ve annoyed myself about this, the sommelier has arrived and it becomes clear that he’s lovely. He picks out three wines, one of which is the house — a chardonnay from Provence. This, of course, is the greenest of flags. I immediately relax and order a carafe of one of his other recommendations, a perfectly lovely gavi (fourth cheapest, since you ask).
The food too has moments of excellence: a bluefin tuna carpaccio with a dressing of spicy-sweet Italian peppers and a dash of Asian citrus; Irish whiskey in a super-light tiramisu is a joyous little innovation. The gigli al gin — a clever riff on vodka rigatoni, a dish that was the future once — is fun, novel and technically faultless. Bouncy al dente flowers of pasta, the slightest of spicy tangs to the tomato sauce from the gin, and chunks of fennelly sausage meat.
Bluefin tuna carpaccio with a dressing of spicy-sweet Italian peppers and a dash of Asian citrus
BETH EVANS
“Irish whiskey in a super-light tiramisu is a joyous little innovation”
BETH EVANS
The other pasta dish we order, the strozzapreti, doesn’t quite match the standard. The noodles are a little floppy; you won’t be strangling any priests with that. A sauce of cavolo nero, walnuts and Spenwood cheese, all blitzed together, is fantastic at the first bite. By the fourth or fifth, it becomes cloying, slightly bitter. Three nutty, earthy ingredients in one sauce is too many when you’ve got a whole dish tasting of nothing but that sauce.
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It’s a shame because when Ahearne gets it right, he gets it so right. Take, for example, the starter of roast delica pumpkin, showered with black pepper to bring out its sweetness. Bitter radicchio leaves are balanced with sweet candied hazelnuts, all held up by a serving of creamy stracciatella that looks ungenerous when I see it in front of me, but turns out to be the perfect quantity. I always have this problem with cheese: if you put it on the plate I will eat every last bite, even to the detriment of the rest of the dish. Such restraint from the chef shows some serious knowledge of flavour. And of human nature.
Sea bass with a shellfish sauce
BETH EVANS
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This is a really solid restaurant. But would I insist that you drop everything to make a booking? I’m not sure. There’s something about this place that’s a little too slick, a little knowing. You won’t have a bad night here. But are there restaurants with a bit more joy, a bit more soul to them that you could go to instead? Yes.
★★★✩✩
1 Pearson Square, London W1T 3BF; motorino.london
Dining and Cooking