A corporate-facing and not-very-Italian-at-all restaurant
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here’s an enormous new “Italian” restaurant just a skip and a jump from the City of London, close to where the country’s money is looked after. But the multi-floored Campanelle doesn’t deign to open at weekends (for now, anyway), because, well, why bother? Who would go? Mind you, on the Friday lunchtime when I stepped into this elegant, all-day brasserie in a Grade II-listed building that was once home to the London Shipping Exchange, the whole place was empty, save for a flurry of diligent, all-female staff. Friday, it seems, is also not a busy day in the City.
Campanelle’s à la carte menu is similarly sparse, and oddly uninspiring. It offers the likes of lobster linguine, breaded veal cutlets alla Milanese and Amalfi lemon tart, and claims to be influenced by the whole of Italy. At breakfast, however, it serves buttermilk chicken waffles and cornbread with organic nama yasai berry jam, though, curiously, not much in the way of fine Italian pastries or coffee.
Restaurants of this kind, which are apparently designed to take money from people with money, tend to drill down on one specific region – let’s say Puglia – before creating an intricate, often fictitious backstory about how Puglia is sealed in the chef/patron’s heart via his nonna in the Foggia mountains. Not so here, however; they haven’t even bothered with a ChatGPT-generated yarn. Instead, there’s just a short list of antipasti, fritti and pastas, as well as pesce and carne that’s reportedly cooked on a charcoal grill, although during my visit I sniffed not a whiff of smoke in the air. Furthermore, Campanelle’s menu makes no claims that its capelli d’angelo (angel-hair pasta) or linguine are handmade, even though a main course serving of pasta carbonara and a painfully lacklustre beef shin ragu fettuccine both come in at £26. That ragu, by the way, was in such dire need of seasoning that even a humble Oxo cube would have worked wonders.
