Review: Zucca, Bermondsey

There’s something about Italian cuisine. Those who are attracted to it seem to invariably be attracted to the idea of “peasant cooking”, of taking raw ingredients and doing simple things to them. The price differential in modern Italian restaurants seems to be dictating more by the price and provenance of the raw ingredients than by the degree of culinary dexterity on display.

This is just an observation, not a judgment. Something simple done well can bring so much more pleasure than something complicated that doesn’t quite work. At the same time, I often find myself comparing the bill from an Italian restaurant with the bill from a modern British gastropub where I’ve enjoyed food of similar complexity and deliciousness and noting that the Italian seems to be marked up 20-25%. Presumably because some of the ingredients had to come from Italy?

Anyway, Zucca is one such place. It’s a stylish dining room on Bermondsey High Street, bearing a smart industrial look paired with clean tables and contemporary dining chairs.

The tapas-style starters are simple fayre; tasty deep-fried vegetables, and a dish of braesola and gorgonzola that was a tad disappointing in that the cheese was in the form of a thin dressing on salad leaves. The most successful was a sharing plate consisting of a very fine salty burrata mozarella surrounded by garlicky bruschetta, fine pickled fennel, cumin roast carrots and crisp lettuce soaked in a very spicy/creamy dressing. All good, all simple.

Maureen picked a pasta main; big curled of it with heritage italian tomatoes and squid sauce. The seafood flavour was pronounced and delicious, the pasta had good bite, but it was a very simple dish. My pork shoulder was cooked slow and full of flavour, with beans and almonds and rainbow chard. It was a deeply satisfying bowl of food, the kind of supper you’d want your dear old Italian grandmother to make on a rainy autumn day. If you had an Italian grandmother, of course.

We reached a pretty clear consensus between the four of us. We all enjoyed our meal, and would probably come here again if we found ourselves living in the area, but it was hard to tie up the simplicity of the menu with the prices.