We're eternally on a mission to discover the city's most delicious pastas and our list of hotspots just got longer thanks to San Carlo.
The San Carlo journey started in 1992 in Birmingham, when Carlo Distefano launched the first San Carlo restaurant. Known for its genuine Italian food, inviting ambiance, and amazing service, San Carlo swiftly captured the hearts of Birmingham. Today, San Carlo now operates throughout the country with leading restaurants in Bristol, Leicester, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and London, where you can find the original iteration in Knightsbridge and St. James's, along with seven further iterations across town. With international openings planned this year in Miami, Morocco, Bahrain and Cairo, it's clearly doing something right.
We recently visited San Carlo on Lower Regent Street for a midweek supper. Its interiors are elegant and inviting, with a muted Mediterranean colour palette, soft lighting and cosy corners. Unlike a certain other Italian chain in London that's very much all about the garish insta-worthy interiors, this is somewhere that lets the food do the talking.
We began with a round of cocktails, a refreshing and spicy Mount 'n' Stormy with Ron Zacapa, Amaro Montenegro, ginger beer, lime and a parmesan crisp (which more cocktails should definitely be accompanied by...) and a Charlie Chaplin, with Plymouth sloe gin, apricot liquer and lime, which was smooth, fresh and fruity. Breads arrived with sundried tomato and black olive tapenades and a bruschetta was piled high with juicy tomatoes - it's easy to forget what they're supposed to taste like given the insipid fruits so often found in the supermarket, but these were ruby red and reminiscent of Italian summers. An antipasti platter was to die for, with Italian meats from Parma ham, salamis and bresaola to mortadella, with sundried tomatoes, artichokes, olives and creamy burrata. Delicious.
Eschewing the pesce and carne, we went straight for the pasta; it's a BIG menu, with 20 pasta varieties alone, 10 fish and nine meat, so it wasn't an easy choice. The pappardelle all'Annatra was a rich, slow cooked duck ragu, flavourful and rich with a hint of aniseed, perfectly enrobing the pasta with every forkful. The cartellate zucca e tartufo however was something else. Handmade filled pasta parcels with pumpkin purée, pecorino, sage, plenty of butter and fresh truffle. Indulgently buttery but worth every calorie.
Dessert was another big menu - 10 options, plus various flavours of ice cream and affogato - but the tiramisu was a must-try, along with the pistachio tart, a super light, deeply delicious almost cheesecake like pudding. Perfection.
There's plenty of places for a great Italian in London, but for somewhere special for a superb dish of pasta, San Carlo was a hit.
