Auguste, a brand spanking new Italian restaurant in Hackney, east London, is named, loosely, after a clown. The Edward Hopper painting Soir Bleu hangs on the wall, depicting a tragic sort in a whiteface mask sitting forlornly in a cafe surrounded by hipsters. The clown’s light veneer of calm, it seems, masks his bare tolerance of both his life and his fellow customers. Hopper painted it in 1914, and now, more than a century later, this same sad clown feels more than a little symbolic of all those who have chosen a life in hospitality at this time. Paint on a smile! Get out there! Make the crowds happy! If only business rates could be paid with a bucketload of glitter …Auguste’s owners, chef Mike Bagnall and general manager Dylan Walters, have taken over the 32-seater premises formerly known as Papi, which recently upped sticks and moved on to a much larger site at The Golden Tooth in Newington Green. The space has been transformed from its Papi days as an extremely hip, European-influenced, irreverent, small plates, low-intervention wine and hyper-cool spot, to its new incarnation as, well, an extremely hip, Abruzzo-influenced, irreverent, small plates, low-intervention wine and hyper-cool spot. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, you might be thinking, but pas exactement! The room now has white tablecloths and the big draw on Auguste’s menu are its skewers or, to be precise, arrosticini. Think tiny mini kebabs with the meat cut into 1cm cubes, then grilled over something called a furnacella. The live-fire craze among London hospitality’s menfolk shows no signs of abating. Man make fire. Fire good.‘Very authentic’: Auguste’s cappelletti in brodo.On a Wednesday night just three weeks after it opened, we snuck into Auguste at 6pm and the place was entirely mobbed. It was as if the old Papi crowd had simply carried on making pilgrimage here, like worker ants not quite realising that their queen’s chamber had moved. That night, the arrosticini came in three varieties: salt marsh lamb, Suffolk wagyu and rose veal liver, all with a choice of four dipping sauces including green goddess, aïoli, chilli and bagna cauda – a silky Italian garlic and anchovy number. We put in our skewer order first, but they didn’t turn up until just before pudding – this is, after all, a hip small plates restaurant, so there are no rules. Uniforms on staff? No. £5 Campari cocktails? Absolutely. Pristine linen but eating meat off sticks? Damned right.The short, frequently changing menu leans heavily on the central Italian region of Abruzzo, so expect the likes of coppa stagionata, stracciatella with yellow datterini tomatoes and wild boar-stuffed morels with Italian summer truffle. We began with a round of bite-size potato rösti topped with an unctuous blue cheese cream that had been piped on in a 1970s dinner party style. Delicious, although the rösti themselves were too soft to bear the weight of their topping; they needed to be drier and crisper.‘The star of the show’: Auguste’s chicken saltimbocca with chicken jus.Next up, some top-quality cured sea bream served with what was billed as puttanesca salsa. Puttanesca, to my mind, means cobbled together or, well, something slightly ruder, but Auguste’s interpretation of it was a rather allium-heavy dressing of onion and red pepper that was, perhaps, a touch crude for the lovely fish. A bowl of cappelletti in a clear broth felt very authentic: the pasta work exemplary, the broth a tad salty, but a great dish overall. A plate of fresh asparagus served with just-podded peas and a wild garlic cream was very pleasant indeed. But the star of the show was a chicken saltimbocca wrapped in prosciutto and sage, fried and finished with a rich, chickeny jus.