184 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 (020 7378 6809). Meal for two, including wine and service, £75
You wait ages for a good, reasonably priced, achingly hip, modern Italian restaurant, and then two come along at once. There are, naturally enough, various things to separate last week's Trullo at London's Highbury Corner and this week's Zucca, on that tight knot of streets near London Bridge where smart young things without children live in apartment spaces without walls. Trullo had a youthful vibe; Zucca feels like Trullo's grown-up brother – it's what the latter would have looked like if they'd had fat investors wanting a piece of the action. It is a clean white space of clean white tables, big windows, concrete and metropolitan attitude, constructed by professionals. It looks, I said to my companion, like the canteen for a smart architectural practice, and then recalled that this was exactly how its inspiration, the River Cafe in Hammersmith, started. The staff are older than at Trullo, their hair cuts a little sharper, the menu a little longer, the kitchen a little more open, the better to watch the cooks taste every dish as it goes out.
What unites them is quality and price. They are each other's ying and yang, separated only by Old Father Thames. Zucca's big selling point is a lengthy list of antipasti at astonishingly good prices. A generous plate full of carpaccio of sea bream, for the princely sum of £4.15, came dressed with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice and curls of fresh red chilli. It had us debating the meeting point of Japanese and Italian food.
Baked hunks of beetroot, long-roasted shallots and soft goat's cheese was both pretty and rich. The most indecently indulgent of the lot, however, was a plate of the vegetable from which the restaurant takes its name – zucca is the Italian for pumpkin – soft cooked, chipped and lightly battered. For £3. Oh my. If I lived nearby I would sneak in for a plateful every day, until I was the size of an apartment block rather than a mere house.
There were just two pasta dishes, one of which, wide pappardelle with peas, lemon and a snowfall of grated Parmesan, had run out by 8.15pm, which suggests pretty poor stock control, but the servings going past us looked irritatingly lovely. The other was exactly the same as at Trullo last week: skinny threads of taglierini with brown shrimps and courgette, a beautiful fusion of an English ingredient with Italian principles. Zucca's was as good as that at Trullo – silky egg-yolk-yellow pasta, nutty little shrimps, a ripe starchy liquor – though at £6.50 it was £2 more expensive for the starter portion. Which is what white walls, acres of shiny glass and older, more plentiful and more seasoned staff costs.
A veal chop, with crisp, caramelised fat and a heap of well-seasoned wilted spinach, was a simple dish full of simple virtues. Another of curiously meaty squid, chargrilled and curled, sprinkled with red chilli and laid on borlotti beans was equally good. The only duff notes were rather ordinary desserts: a slightly overset panna cotta with roasted peaches, and a more than slightly over-baked almond and cherry tart. But when the bill stacks up as it does here – helped by a wine list with lots of choice in the teens – such a thing is merely a vague disappointment rather than the bloody outrage the too-standard three-figure bill engenders.
So now north and south London have access to great Italian food. To those outside the capital who want to moan that there is a world beyond London, I could say that the city is witnessing a massive explosion in restaurants. But the real reason for the outbreak of London reviews involves one of my kids, a raging infection, the brilliant services of the NHS and a lot of time bedside. (He's fine now.) Frankly, for anybody wishing to rage at me for being metro-centric, I regard this as a get-out-of-jail-free card. And the restaurant reviews as a blessed relief from far too much canteen food. After all, man cannot live by paninis and packets of crisps alone. Normal service out-of-London will resume shortly.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
