Best Free Guide for Italian Food in London

 

Ciao! This guide features my top picks of Italian restaurants, bakeries, and street food spots that I absolutely love to visit in London.

Food guide https://docs.google.com/document/d/10jZzUZ_xoF9pIBRzxfmB1FoviiC_kAzYUzdnhUUntys/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/10jZzUZ_xoF9pIBRzxfmB1FoviiC_kAzYUzdnhUUntys/edit?usp=sharing

La Terza via - 6

 

Un giorno, mentre ci preparavamo  una pizza per la nostra pausa pranzo, Donato   mi disse che stava raccogliendo dei soldi per fare un regalo a Giampiero, di cui a breve sarebbe ricorso il genetliaco. Risposi che avrei partecipato ben volentieri e soltanto doveva dirmi che cifra dovessi versare per partecipare al regalo. Prima di rispondermi mi disse che la sua idea era di regalargli un pezzo di hashish,  per il quale Giampiero andava matto. Io non feci commenti anche se ricordo che pensai “Contento lui!”  Dissi che per me non c’erano problemi. Lui si limitò ad aggiungere che il fumo lo avrebbe comprato da Natale, grande fumatore ed esperto e che Giampiero mi aveva  invitato alla festa di compleanno che avrebbe dato sabato sera a casa sua. Venerdì sera, prima di smontare dal lavoro,  gli chiesi quanto gli dovessi dare. Donato mi rispose che Natale non aveva voluto soldi per un tocco di hashish che aveva voluto procurare gratuitamente,  come sua personale partecipazione al regalo di Giampiero. Mi scrisse l’indirizzo di Giampiero in un foglietto, raccomandandomi di non mancare.

All’indomani, ruppi  tutti i miei dubbi e le mie incertezze e decisi di recarmi alla festa di Giampiero. Mentre ero in viaggio in metropolitana cercai di vincere e dominare le mie apprensioni,  dicendo a me stesso che non era obbligatorio per me fumare quella sostanza misteriosa e sconosciuta; e poi non era neppure detto che me ne sarebbe stata data l’occasione. Quante storie! Avrei potuto sempre rifiutarmi di fumare. Io all’epoca fumavo ancora le sigarette (rigorosamente quelle di stato). Mi bastavano e avanzavano. Così rimuginando arrivai alla casa di Willesden Green, dove abitava Giampiero. Mi aprì una ragazza che mi fece entrare  senza farmi domande. Io dissi soltanto che ero invitato alla festa di compleanno di Giampiero.

https://www.hoepli.it/libro/la-terza-via-un-uomo-un-viaggio-tre-strade/9788833812366.html

London for ever - 35

Chapter IX

A very nice snack bar

In my work place, on Monday, after the Sunday rest, there was always a big mess. Even that Monday, I had a great deal on putting  everything back in order, as it liked me and  was my duty to be done. When I finished it was   almost midday. 

I had  usually lunch  with a  sandwich and a cappuccino. 

In London to find a snack bar where you can have a quick meal at noon is almost easier than  find a pub where to drink  a pint of beer. Provided that one does not want to join meal and beer in a Public House. 

My digestive system, to be honest, has  always recommend me to  frequent pubs only in the evenings, avoiding strictly to have there any kind of meal, especially if in the form of hot dish. 

Certain  Anglo-Saxon names, albeit seemingly to have an edible, bombastic euphony,  may conceal seriously unpleasant  surprises, such as some kind of animal innards, which in normal pastafoglia casings are located vaguely with  colorful vegetables,  cooked and mixed with approximately and squishy sauces, and have a really  indefinable taste and almost  unsustainable smell. 

These snacks, I say, are typically owned by Italian immigrants, not necessarily  men from the south of Italy.
Many of them  left the Italy at the time of the Great War,to escape conscription first and then misery; others in the following  two decades, because of fascism and clumsy arrogance of the royal Italian bureaucracy, which had ended up succumbing to the reasons of the Fascist State. As a matter of fact these nationalist reasons had no connection to men and transcended their  individual needs and rights,  ending for  sacrificeing, paradoxically, even that of the free private initiative, the true soul of the entrepreneurs who had savagely opposed the occupation of factories and the unrest in the streets, which was indeed the   prelude to the takeover of power by the fascist ideology. 

And the more that stood out in comparison with the efficient, impartial and careful administration of British society, always willingly glad  to welcome into it smanufacturing background  those managerial  Italians traders, so keenly skillful  in the restaurant business in a particular way. 

And of  Italy they kept that idea a bit unreal and mythical in their remembrances ,  more due  to  their distant and nostalgic fantasy than the  now unknown reality. And if now, the financial viability of their assets in pounds sterling, suddenly get the memory of past miseries,the veil of nostalgic left however only filter those idealistic visions that the passage of time makes the most idyllic and remote. 

Such memories of first generation immigrants sometimes pull them  to attempt a risky and most frequently, traumatic return, while their children and grandchildren, British born or raised there, misguided by the stereotypes of British press about the mafia, on corruption and the disasters of Italian Finance (all partial true rather than absolute of a reality far more complex and multifaceted), preferred to think of Italy as a place of special holidays, to be  decanted with exotic tones coming back to their new Country, together and apart from the inevitable comments on dysfunction of public and private services, small and large cheating of a people still convinced to be  still under the yoke of Spanish Bourbon Royals or even Austro-Hungarian, culinary delights, the artistic and natural beauties (perhaps abandoned to themselves), led by the iconoclastic Napolitanean  of sun, pizza and sea. 

I mean in this snack-bar down the road I could grab a quickbite and a tea in a short time, in order to be quickly back at work, with roads that soon  would be filled with people around the lunch-time and multiple other purposes. 

In my way to the snack I met Mickle, a funny man already in his seventies, a native of Kent who, pulling  his umbrellas ‘ cart, had started  his  slow praising chant,  among the general indifference of passers-bies. 

I don't know how or why, but whenever I met him in the street with his cart, it always happened that the sky was obscured following a  copious rain, within an hour or  maybe two. So much so,  that someone, perhaps a colleague in the Company, whose interests and profits were evident in inverse proportion to rain and bad weather,  had once  suggested that I would dash through touching  wood . His fame as a jinx, real or alleged it might be, was increased by the fact that he used to  wore black suits; furthermore  he was  always dark on his face, black were his eyes and, despite his age, even his  hair were black. 

35. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 2

The next Monday I started working for Emilio’s Pizza Factory. The factory was set in Farringdon, East London, somewhere in Smithfield Rd, if I’m not wrong. We made packaged pizzas for big markets, Sainsbury, Tesco, things like that, if you know what I mean. The staff was all made by a small group of Egyptian Copts, a bunch of Italian guys, an old Portuguese named Pinto (who was often kidding the Egyptians in a mixed of Portuguese and   English but  spoken  with marked Iberian pronunciation ) and a retired old Easter Londoner, who was able to mark with  three or four fucking  a speech of five or six words. It was him that I first started with my job that Monday of August 1977. Our duty was to cut the cheddar cheese (which took the place of Italian soft mozzarella in packaged pizzas, and not only, as I quickly learned in London) and send it upstairs, through the lift.

-“ Fuck you, and fucking shut, ‘you know, the fucking door!” he used to shout from

underground space, in order to call the elevator and send the cheese up.

The cheese was kept in a large fridge, down there. Old Jim (that was his name) didn’t allow me to get in the fridge. He did, all the time. It was stocked in big packages of fifty pounds. We were busy on cutting them, by means of wooden handles sharp iron,  on strict, long  slices to be shred in the electric grater before to be sent upstairs on big plastic hampers.

Upstairs there was the production chain.

In a large electric mixer they put flour, yeast, salt and water. After an hour and a half the kneading was ready. Then it had to be pressed to obtain a plain leaf from which they made a circles of five inches diameter. With a trolley they had taken and put in the oven for about ten, fifteen minutes. With the same trolleys, after the baking,  a boy took them

on the assembly chain where the round pizza was flavored with tomatoes juice, cheese and some spices ( besides the plain pizza, we made mushroom and yellow or red pepper’s). In the end we put a brown preservative powder (the only ingredient we avoid when, at lunch time, we made our own pizzas). Finally they were wrapped in cellophane with the seller’s mark, and good appetite.

We went on that way from height  a.m. till 4 p.m..

At that time I had a thick beard and I talked to none, a part those few words with Jim, needed for unroll the work.

When later, I made friendship with the Italian colleagues, they  confess had thought I was a sort of fugitive man, hiding himself to escape from someone or something.

As a matter of fact I was just escaping from myself, and  I was too shy and insecure to make friendship easily.

After a couple of months I asked the boss to go upstairs and he wanted to please me.

2.     To be continued…

Memoirs of London - 1

1.

The first time I went to London it was in 1977. A long time ago. I still remember the day I landed at Heathrow airport. It was the day Elvis Presley died. I remember from my bus, in the endless one which was to lead me to Victoria Station (according to my ticket bus), the supporter’s march in honor of the great song singer from Memphis. They held in their hands signs of their idol: “Elvis will never die” or “Elvis forever”, “You still live in our hearts” and things like that.

I was a young man full of hope and sorrow, at that time. I was going to London to forget an unrequited  love; or maybe I was just searching for something I had not found yet.

I had at present left my university’s studies, with no money, no job, no love at all. Lonely as a stone can be.

I had not been really very fond of Elvis; surely much more of Jimy Hendrix; Elvis was a too controversial myth at my eyes; a great singer of course, I wouldn’t say he was not; but sometimes I felt like he had been exploited by the American industry of success; that kind of business able to create (and also destroy, if they wanted) any kind of myth, any kind of star; ‘you know? That sort of star’s system victim like Marylin Monroe or James Dean. I was quite a critic of capitalism at that time.

But indeed I had already too many problems by my own to be a critic of anything.

I only had an address on my pocket, of a friend of mines who had previous gone to London and I was in contact with. Through this friend I was introduced in an Italian Grocery, in King’s Cross Road. I’ve recently there. Where the shop was there’s now only an insignia, covered by dust, left. I found good help in there. A friend of the owner, a good marchigian guy who sold Italian hams, cheese and other special Italian food, found me a job in a pizza’s factory, somewhere in Farringdon Rd. And George himself, I mean the marchigian shopper, found me a place to sleep in: a room in Keystone Crescent, just around the corner his shop, where I was charged with 5 pound fee per week while in the factory my first wage was a good 40 weekly wage’s pounds .

Not too bad for a beginner.

1.     To be continued…

Umami Pizza, Please

If you got enough with the usual tastes or you feel fed up with Napoli, Margherita and Mushrooms flavours, just ask for Umami Fifth Sense when you call up the boy for a pizza!

A Japanese new taste, called the fifth sense, to indicate that is not sweet, nor bitter,sour and salty, will be soon offered in different northern English supermarkets at the price of £ 2.99 for a single paste tube.

Have a nice meal then with Umami taste!

To know more read the Daily Mail On LineBy Neil Millard

Many an amateur chef has tasted a dish only to declare that something is missing.
What follows is the inevitable excursion through the larder looking for that magic ingredient.
But the days of this culinary lottery appear to be numbered as a substance first known only to science - bottled 'deliciousness' - is coming to the High Street.
Umami was discovered 102 years ago by a Japanese scientist but until now has only graced the shelves of Michelin-starred restaurants.
It is the secret to making anything taste fantastic, so much so it is known as the 'fifth taste'.
And pretty soon you will be able to add it to absolute everything as tubes of the wonder stuff go on sale in 197 branches of Waitrose for £2.99 a tube.
Named Taste No 5, evoking the added allure of a high-class perfume, it triggers the sensation of delight in the brain when at least one of the primary tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty is also present.
Food writer Laura Santtini, who developed the purée, said: 'I wanted to get away from the notion that umami is something of interest to scientists that no one else can really understand.
'The truth is that umami should be of interest to anyone who has a tongue.
'Umami is part of our everyday eating lives, it is just that many of us don't know what to call it. It is what gives depth of flavour to food.
Umami - the fifth sense of taste
Umami is the Japanese word for the fifth basic sense of taste, after bitter, salty, sour and sweet.
Despite being known in the East for more than 100 years, particularly Japan, it is a relatively new concept to the West where only the four primary tastes are recognised.
Umami means deliciousness in Japanese, but translates best as 'savouriness' and provides the 'meaty' flavour in meat.
It is formed from glutamates being detected by receptors on the tongue and is the reason why monosodium glutamate (MSG) is used as a flavour enhancer.
It is also found naturally in meats, cheeses and mushrooms.
'Every food culture has its umami-rich ingredients, whether it is seaweed in Japan or Parmesan in Italy.'
The ingredients in her recipe for umami, literally meaning 'taste', include pulped anchovy and porcini mushrooms.
The umami revolution began in 1908 when Tokyo chemist Kikunae Ikeda identified it as a flavour present in foods high in glutamate.
He had first been alerted by the distinctive taste of seaweed, or kombu, which itself is high in the chemical.
His work led him to crystallise monosodium glutamate (MSG), the controversial flavour enhancer which has since become famous all over the world.
Then in 2000 researchers at the University of Miami discovered the tongue had taste receptors dedicated to sensing glutamate, which signals the presence of proteins in food that the body needs.
The opportunities presented by umami have since been exploited by the restaurant world and celebrity chefs including Heston Blumenthal who purposefully plates up dishes brimming with umami at his Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire.


Buna Shimeji mushrooms and steak are high in umami


The fifth taste is also present in seaweed and Parmesan cheese
Far from being a Japanese phenomenon there are examples of foods high in umami in every culture.
Worcestershire Sauce and Marmite are two British standard bearers. Human breast milk is also high in umami.
Taste No 5 will be stocked in 197 branches of Waitrose from next week and will go on sale at the Booths supermarket chain in northern England next month.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249571/Umami-Tubes-Taste-No-5-set-revolutionise-cooking-fifth-taste.html#ixzz0f723MUHa