I loved Casa Felicia in Queen’s Park despite myself, and that is the best way for love to start. It’s a small, local restaurant — but not local to me — professing to deliver simple, rustic, Italian food, which is not something I crave or even especially trust, on a street I have never liked, in an area I have no use for, which has never done anything for anyone apart from to lend its name, quite randomly, to the finest football team the world has ever seen, which plays nowhere near it.
But my friend Tony, who lives near enough to Casa Felicia to walk there (though far enough away not to be offended by my opening paragraph), had been a couple of times and said it was good, and, meh, I wasn’t doing anything else.
• Read more restaurant reviews and recipes from our food experts
From the outset, annoyingly, Casa Felicia got everything right. The sun was shining after morning rain when I rode up on my Lime bike (there is a parking bay right outside) and whichever way Casa Felicia faces, it was the right way for wet sunlight to be slicing in through the front windows onto the white-washed brick walls behind the bar in a way that was, I accept, extremely Italian. Perhaps because those walls were lined with shelves of Campari bottles, which love a slice of sunlight going through them, to bring out the pink.
“The sea bass crudo was excellent”
Our waiter wore a flat cap, earrings, stubble, tattoos and a waistcoat (or maybe I imagined the waistcoat) in a way that put you in mind of Peaky Blinders, until he spoke with an accent that repositioned your hipster/gangster sensibility towards more of a young Michael Corleone thing. Although he’s from Napoli, not Sicily, and he’s called Gabriele. A childhood friend of Francesco Sarvonio, the chef, apparently.
He sold us bread and oil at £4.50 that he said was pane cafone, a Campania loaf “not at all like focaccia”, which struck me as more or less identical to a white English bloomer, with very good green olive oil, and some slices of Neapolitan salami for £5, cut quite thickly, which was very mild and porky and clean with strong black pepper heft.
We ordered a bottle of Greco di Tufo for only three times the online price (not the four or five times I’ve been seeing around), which comes also from Campania, obviously, and it was cold and dry and as we sloshed it back with the bread and sausage, the sunlight pinking the whitewashed walls through the Campari bottles, it was hard not to sigh and say, “Ah, Italy,” citing such hallowed examples of the 1980s/1990s London Italian restaurant boom as the River Cafe in Hammersmith and Riva in Barnes. Both so simple and rustic that you can eat in either for little more than a million quid a head.
“The vitello tonnato was a steal at £17”
“The spaghetti alla nerano, made with fried courgette rounds and fresh courgette flowers, lots of butter and cheese and garlic and basil, was dreamy”
Tony ordered the sea bass crudo (£15), which is not a dish I’d ever bother with, it being available everywhere nowadays and never especially worth the effort — the Italians will kill me for saying they only started serving it here in the wake of the Peruvian ceviche boom of the 2010s — but I would have been wrong to eschew it. It was excellent. The sweet, pink, cleanly sliced fish had been aged for two days to lose that flab of excess water and bubbled in a fantastically sharp Amalfi lemon juice given body by a Campanian fish sauce, with sliced sweet onion, dill and loads of those tiny, dry, fried red crusco peppers, which lent crunch and aroma but only a little fire.
The vitello tonnato was a steal at £17, being more like a dish of cold roast veal for a hungry man than one of those dainty, wafer-thin, Mayfair reimaginings at twice the price, with its pile of sweet pink meat and half-dozen big blobs of strong tuna sauce, each topped with a crisp, salty, dried caper. Then some braised cima di rapa over the top and even, I think, a spoonful of the roasting juices.
Then we had a couple of pastas, dreamy ones: a special, which Tony ordered before I got there, that must have been a spaghetti alla nerano (£18), having been made with fried courgette rounds and fresh courgette flowers, lots of butter and cheese and garlic and basil; and rigatoni carbonara (£19), in which the thick, wheaty tubes had real weight and a full nutty flavour, under the rich cheesy sauce and shards of crisp, fried guanciale and black pepper.
We didn’t really need any more food and should probably have called it a day there, but the menu offered a big T-bone, a cotoletta alla bolognese and then some whole fish: a brill at £110, a plaice at £35 and a gurnard at £60. So we went for the gurnard and another glass of wine. But they didn’t get the fish quite right. It happens. Gurnard is a tricky bastard. It is ethical as anything, being both ugly and unpopular and thus abundant, but it doesn’t have a huge amount of flavour in and of itself. I’ve only ever had any joy egging and flouring fillets of it and then frying the bejesus out of them to serve with a tangy sauce. A long poach in stock, whole, with sliced potatoes and vegetables, didn’t quite come off for me. But maybe I was too full after all that other stuff.
• Read more by Giles Coren
And then I think the tiramisu could be improved. It felt a little heavy, a little fridge cold. But then if it’s made right, it should last for days and still be reasonably light and fluffy. Again, I’m no massive lover of desserts, as we all know, so perhaps don’t come to me on that.
Chef Francesco Sarvonio, left, with his friend and business partner Gabriele Di Franco
In fact, let’s just cut off after the pastas and say that this was a lovely way to escape the clichés of a London new year into the clichés of a classically simple Italian lunch: lovely produce, good wine, charming service, terrific pasta, some very good, hearty cooking and not a turkey sandwich or Brussels sprout bubble and squeak in sight.
Casa Felicia
79 Salusbury Road, London NW6 (casa-felicia.com; 07748 021775)
Cooking 8
Vibes 8
Service 8
Score 8
Price £85/head
Dining and Cooking