It is an old London fairytale that there are no good restaurants in Hampstead. When the good restaurants were being handed out, Hampstead was ignored, betrayed, disgraced — given only a Carluccio’s, a Café Rouge and a quite disgusting Chinese place that has a ridiculous water feature and its own bridge. This is the story, anyway, as told to frightened children in north-west London.
I thought I would try to break the spell, and find a restaurant worth paying for, so I do not have to go to Camden and fight my way through fetish boots and tall angry men who smell. There may be one, it is said — just one restaurant in Hampstead that passes. The Villa Bianca. It is an Italian restaurant that looks like a white Dickensian shop on a charming paved lane. This is fancy-schmancy Hampstead, sold to American expats as the British countryside, but near enough to Heathrow airport for them to return to America and ruin lives there too.
Villa Bianca practises 1980s tasteful non-taste — a black and white floor, white walls and very small chairs, which I find offensive. So we take a booth outside by the flowers, where I can both smoke and fit. The waiter is towering and terrifying: an old-fashioned monster with a florid face and big hair. At least he doesn’t object to our taking the booth. Male readers should know that women are oppressed by restaurants. We are usually stuck by the toilets as if we are incontinent, or have a psychic need to be near mirrors and plumbing.
Down comes the breadbasket with a thump. Three kinds but it isn’t freshly cut, so one side feels like bad skin crumbling. Boo. It is a dead Monday lunchtime. There was time to cut the bread.
The tagliatelle with wild mushrooms is delightful, though; my mouth is happy, filled with mushroom and butter and properly cooked pasta. I am always amazed by how some Italian restaurants cannot cook spaghetti, but I do not have to call the chef and bite his face. Eric has tuna carpaccio, which is pale and tangy; he says he likes it, before he gets drunk on three cold glasses of house white and goes vertiginous, and I can only hear the mumble of opinions, and see a bit of hair. My boyfriend, who arrives late, says his antipasti are ‘fine’. But he says that about everything. They could turn to dust in his mouth and he would say fine. That is why I am marrying him. The waiter gets in a panic when he turns up and wants the order immediately, before the kitchen closes. I have worked in restaurants, and I know chefs’ minds. They are the actors of the service industry and they love to feel persecuted. But I wish their carers wouldn’t communicate their sense of victimhood; for the rest of the lunch, we feel guilt, and guilt is tasteless.
For main course boyfriend has spaghetti bolognese, which I refuse to disgrace this column by reviewing. Spaghetti bolognese has a canon already, and I will not add to it. My veal milanese is a damp lemony slab of perfectly cooked meat; the mashed potato, incredibly, has charisma, like Judy Garland. Eric looks on his tagliatelle with lamb with horror; fat lumps of lamb and pasta is not a dish for a slender man in July. It is horrible; an Edgar Allen Poe short story on a plate.
Pudding. Eric prods his chocolate soufflé until the sauce flows out. ‘Dry,’ he says eventually. The tiramisu is saintly and surrounded by strawberries — smiling pink acolytes, sweet, lovely. Boyfriend doesn’t have a pudding, which means he doesn’t like the restaurant. Do you like this restaurant? ‘It’s fine,’ he says. It is £120. And it is fine. Just fine. Hampstead has no good restaurants, but one of them is ‘fine’. This fairytale is true.
Villa Bianca, 1 Perrins Court, London NW3 1QS; 020 7435 3131
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