La Goccia is an Italian restaurant in the same courtyard as the Petersham restaurant and from the same stable. It’s got a glamorous inner dining room with a bar counter, and a lighter outer room off the courtyard. This is where we were led when we arrived, pretty much the first guests of the evening at 5:30pm, and shown to the corner-most little table shoved up against the wall. I’m sure there are reasons, but it always seems mean-spirited to me, to offer the crappiest table to the first guests to arrive. Forcing us to be the ones to say “oh, could we maybe sit there instead?”

So we moved ourselves to the kitchen counter to watch the chefs at work. The menu is chunked into categories; raw, from the oven, from the grill, pasta, etc. We started with an excellent beef tartare, good meat and well prepared, freshened up with a scatter of garden-fresh veg bits that worked a treat with the flavoursome beef.

We picked a couple of “signature” dishes (I’m always hopefully these are the dishes the chefs are most proud of, rather than simply the ones with the best margin). First up was Tuscan dough balls, with which you can choose to add two of four additions. We chose culatello (a high grade of well-flavoured serrano ham) and gorgonzola. The dough balls were indeed good, nut brown outside and chewy inside. The meat was truly excellent, from a Haye Farm in Devon, and the gooey mild cheese went very well with the balls. The other signature was their fried chicken: pieces of various size in a good crisp, thin breadcrumb that wasn’t oily at all and a nice deep red colour. Good aioli. And the chicken had been liberally sprinkled with a zesty spice mix of a Middle Eastern flavour. Good flavour, but so heavily shaken over the chicken that it was just too much dry spice after the second piece.

We tried a couple of grilled skewers. Squid and spring onion was okay, though the squid would have benefited from some charring off the grill. King oyster mushroom, also okay but might have liked a bit more char and some kind of glaze maybe? Both skewers were served with deep-fried sage leaves and some dribbles of a mild salsa verde. Finally, we went for a grilled mackerel fillet with Mediterranean salad. This was a pleasant enough dice of tomato and capsicum with herbs, and the mackerel was a good fillet neatly cooked.

Cocktails were decent and we found some very good wines by the glass – it’s a good looking wine list, to my untrained eye. You might spend around £50 each for a meal without drinks, and although there were some decent dishes it’s telling that the dough balls with ham and cheese were my favourite thing. There’s a lot better Italian food around for this price.

We’re on a bit of an Italian vibe at the moment, no idea why. The latest is Officina OO, a pasta restaurant stuck out a little bit on its own, north past all the bustling eateries around Charlotte Street. Worth the extra few yards, though.

Nice comfy leather chairs and plenty of space, with an open kitchen and counter as well. Friendly service. The menu covers snacks, starters and pasta – deliberately no secondi here, and the menu is fairly keenly priced as well. So are the cocktails and wines. I enjoy a limoncello martini, Maureen a very good negroni spritz.

We start with a couple of bites. Cacio e pepe raviolo are deep-fried puffs of pasta with peppery cheese goop inside, tasty enough although I’ve had many more moreish snacks. Like the aubergine and nduja croquettes that come next, crunchy outside and deliciously peppy inside with a good grating of pecorino on top and a little honey that balances nicely.

My pasta is caserecce, chunky mid-length tubes I’ve not tried before. The sauce was intriguing: pistachio pesto with yuzukoshu, a Japanese paste of chilli and yuzu citrus. The resulting flavour was good although something of a muddle, with no particular flavour standing out and a whole plateful becoming a little much. Maureen’s 100 layer vegetarian lasagna was superb. The pasta sheets made an appealing block, consistently cooked to a pleasant softness and sitting in a heap of deliriously dark and umami ragu made from San Marzano tomatoes. This sauce made a very convincing replacement for beef, powerful and yet balancing bitter and sweet notes very neatly. The light parmesan cream poured on top was a good foil and the whole dish was great.

This was just a light lunch stop, so that was enough for us. Based on this outing I’m very happy to include Officina OO on my list of useful places to know in the middle of town. Three courses would probably be £35 each without drinks.