In a back room, Maria Grazia is making pasta on a long table against a backdrop of log piles, a roaring, wood-burning stove and bashed, rickety furniture. She’s wheeling out sheets of eggy pasta dough, slapping them with flour so they don’t stick, each movement fluid and expert. She rolls little dods of more dough down a ridged wooden bat, knocking out fat cavatelli to be served later with egg and pancetta. Then back to the sheets, dotting them with blobs of ricotta and herbs, cutting and folding into ranks of identical tricorn tortelli, a study in seemingly effortless skill. “I learned it,” she says with a smile, in halting English, “from my grandmother.”
Forgive the plummet into simpering romanticism: blame Campania & Jones. It is the prettiest place, a ramshackle charmer that makes others’ attempts at artless, rustic chic look like a Hilton executive suite. Formerly a dairy, its premises used to house actual cows. Yes: in the heart of Hackney. (The faded S Jones sign from those dairy days is still above the door, the parvenu “Campania” hiding on the window.) The front room is all Italian cafe meets rus in urbe idyll, coffee machine hissing away; rooms are linked by a “garden” looking into the small kitchen, flagstoned and dripping with ossifying plant life. A handful of outdoor tables offer the primest espresso-drinking real estate. The original, Campania Gastronomia, landed around the corner on Columbia Road in 2008, a fixture of the Sunday morning plant-buying frenzy, but having taken on this gem of a building dating from the late 1800s, owner Emma Lantosca has created something truly special.
The Pinterest-piquing styling is all very well, but is the food any good? As you can probably infer from Maria Grazia’s backroom industry, and the fire and clatter of Neapolitan chef Paolo De Martino in the kitchen, yes, yes, it is. There’s a short daily menu, plus an even shorter lunchtime sheet (two courses with a glass of wine for £15), and everything is as fresh and salty and real as a saunter down the Spaccanapoli.
The handmade pasta is obviously a must-have. We order those tortelli, scattered with spears of al dente asparagus and a puree of verdant spring vegetables. A vegetarian pal is in heaven. Ditto with stout, blowsy gnudi (literally, “nakeds”: the filling of stuffed pasta without the pasta) bathed in butter, parmesan and leaves of crisped sage. There are wide pappardelle, somewhat over-dressed in a swamp of ripe veal and beef ragù, but I guess generosity shouldn’t be seen as a flaw. And spaghetti, fragrant with wine, garlic and cherry tomatoes, tangled around many mussels and clams.
Main dishes might be more elaborate: a vast slab of beef ribeye, halfway between braised and grilled, hums with rosemary and red wine; gilthead bream, burnished from the frying pan, comes flanked with red prawns and glossy tresses of emerald, chilli-spiked barba di frate. Polpettone (big meatball) is even more rustic than our surroundings, a huge slab of garlicky, almost-meatloaf of beef and veal, stuffed with ham and hard-boiled egg, and covered in a sparky tomato sauce. There’s cheese oozing out of the thing, too – provolone, I think. It’s a bruiser, a broken-nosed thug of a dish, but, eaten with tiny chunks of rosemary and olive oil-roast potato, it has oodles of deliciously oikish charm.
This isn’t hip London restaurant food so much as the cooking of Italian homes, of nonne, of hours spent companionably cranking out pasta in domestic kitchens. It would bring a tear to the proverbial glass eye. Everything is delivered with grace and generosity: our server, Marilena, leaves the parmesan with grater on the table to help ourselves; a fine, dangerously drinkable Greco di Tufo is 22 quid. There’s fried pizza dough and mozzarella with grilled vegetables as an antipasto, and a vast slab of fluffy, boozy tiramisù for dessert. Well, of course there is.
I’m enchanted by Campania & Jones. As a building, its beauty has survived the decades, attracting the attention of fashion photographers and ad men (I have particular irritation at its starring role in a cringeworthy spot for an online bank, complete with anthropomorphic bloody platypus). And now it has the ideal tenant. It’s not perfect, but I simply don’t care. I’ve probably ruined it for all of us now. I apologise to them. I apologise to you. But, most of all, I’m apologising to myself.
Campania & Jones 23 Ezra Street, London E2, 020-7613 0015. Open Tues-Sat, lunch 12.30-3.30pm (5pm Sat), dinner 7-11pm; Sun 9am-9pm. About £40 a head plus drinks and service.
Food 7/10
Atmosphere 9/10
Value for money 7/10
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