Norma, 8 Charlotte Street, London W1T 2LS (020 3995 6224). Snacks £3.50-£8, small plates £8-£15, large plates £19-£30, desserts £3.50-£9, wines from £27
Movie critics get excited about the latest Scorsese picture. Theatre critics get excited when they hear Tom Stoppard has written a new play. I’m a restaurant critic, so I got excited when I heard about Norma, a new restaurant from the team behind the Stafford hotel. The Stafford is hidden away down one of the lanes off London’s St James’s Street. It’s a neighbourhood occupied by shops selling only things you might want rather than anything you might ever need: a handmade pair of shoes, say, or a £15m superyacht. In 2017, the Stafford became home to the Game Bird, a restaurant nobody thought they needed, but which it turned out I really wanted.
The Game Bird was that rare thing, an instant classic, which transformed what had been a moribund dining room where your evening went to die, into a place of joy, albeit spendy joy. You went for the glide of the smoked salmon trolley, and the steak and ale suet pudding in a lake of shiny gravy; for the perfect chicken Kiev that came with its own overtly kinky black leather vest to be worn against Bellagio fountains of garlic butter. Mostly you went for the feeling that in here, everything will be looked after. I am regularly asked to recommend somewhere for a special meal in London. The Game Bird is one of those I most regularly suggest. (The others, because you’re asking, are Margot and Rules.)
Earlier this year it was announced that Ben Tish, formerly of the Salt Yard group’s collection of Mediterranean restaurants, was joining the Stafford as chef director. He would also open Norma, which would major on the food of Sicily and its Moorish influences, Tish having recently completed a handsome cookbook called, aptly, Moorish. This was the coming together of people who know exactly what they are doing. If any new restaurant deserved to be taken seriously in this world of gloom and threat, it was this one. It promised to be a place that could keep the gloom at bay.
Then again, even the greatest team can screw up. Just ask the people who put together Turn off the Dark, the Spiderman musical. Happily, this lot haven’t screwed up. Norma is the kind of effortless crowd-pleaser that takes serious work. It occupies a narrow townhouse on Charlotte Street, just north of Oxford Street, so that each floor’s dining room has about it the classy glow of a vintage train’s dining car. At the front is a raw bar, the ice stacked with smooth-shelled cherrystone clams and red prawns, curled up against each other. There are booths upholstered in amber plush, and deco-style glass panels. The floor and walls are tiled in a Moorish pattern of interlocking points. All about is a downlit glow. It has a sense of intimacy, without requiring you to be so close to your neighbour you can detect their deodorant.
The menu is built around snacks and small plates, with a handful of pastas and chunkier mains. There is an essay to be written, a rather dull, earnest one, about the way classy metropolitan restaurants re-engineer the food of what might look like leftovers into desirable objects for urban taste-chasers. Arancini are just a way to stop you throwing out the uneaten risotto. Likewise, the spaghettini fritters served here, for £6, were once just a way to use up uneaten pasta. The lesson is this: we should all cook more pasta than we need, so it too can be formed into such blissful discs and fried until crisp and golden. Enough parmesan is grated over the top to make them disappear from view. Alongside is a pot of a warm parmesan and olive oil sauce. It’s a fondue that’s taken on a personal trainer and butched up. The whole dish is the domestic, made glamorous.
Golden triangles of a kind of bread formed from chickpea purée also come with their own sauce, a strident and aromatic salsa verde. We have halved violet artichokes, trimmed back to the important bits and seared until their edges are caramelised, with a walnut whip-shaped dollop of a pine nut purée. From the raw bar come slices of sea bream with a pinkish glow, dressed with peppery olive oil and both pomegranate seeds and the salty orange promise of bottarga.
I could happily have carried on building dinner like this, from the cheery snacks that start at £4 for the chickpea bread, through the fresh promise of the raw bar to the antipasti that tops out at £14. Norma is no one’s version of cheap. Nevertheless, it’s a menu that allows you to get at the good stuff without selling your least favoured child to pay the bill. The wine list has reasonable choice below £35, practically a bargain in this part of town, and all the pasta dishes are £9, though you can upsize if you want one as a main course.
The fresh tagliolini is a classic dish with pine nuts, the sweet burst of raisins and broken up fragments of sardine, is cut so thinly it’s closer to an Asian egg noodle. The strands are coated thickly in a pleasingly starchy sauce and demand to be slurped. I order only one of the large plates, a chunky roasted chop of rose veal, with lemon, anchovy and black cabbage, peaking up from a deep puddle of rust-coloured masala sauce. It’s a hefty £30 and the cut justifies the price, but you need not venture into that part of the menu.
Dessert takes the question seriously. There are crisp cannoli shells filled to order with sweetened ricotta cream, rich in orange zest. In an age when tube station kiosks will sell you dusty cannoli with use-by dates, it’s a keen reminder of just how good they should be. There is a choice of granitas; the passion fruit is designed to slap you awake with fruit and acidity. Then there is the star turn: a sweet brioche bun, its crust glazed with crunchy caramel. The bun is sliced open and filled with salted caramel ice cream and chocolate sauce. Which bit of that description isn’t doing it for you? Please don’t tell me. I’ll only think less of you.
There is no question: I went into Norma hoping for the best. I always do. Happily, this one delivers on the potential of all those involved. It was that joyous thing: a new restaurant genuinely worth being excited about.
News bites
While Norma focusses on the food of Italy’s deep south, over in London’s Shoreditch, chef Stevie Parle’s Palatino looks to Rome for inspiration and finds a lot of it. Try the fried squash with crisp sage leaves and honey, or bitter puntarelle with anchovy sauce, followed by that huge crowd pleaser cacio e pepe and then veal saltimbocca with a lip-smacking marsala sauce. Finish with lemon and ricotta cake (palatino.london).
If you happen to be visiting Paris and are looking for something to do between meals, a new exhibition, curated by historian Emmanuelle Cronier, has just opened at the Bibliothèque Forney exploring how the French capital has fed itself down the centuries: the short supply chains of the middle ages, the vital role of the markets of Les Halles, through to the role of cafés and food stands in times of crisis. Forney is close to the Bastille.
Meanwhile, London’s Borough Market has just launched a click and collect and delivery service from a bunch of traders including Cannon and Cannon charcuterie, Neil’s Yard Dairy, Ted’s Veg and the Ginger Pig. At present delivery is only within a 1.5m radius but they are looking to expand this (goodsixty.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
