Soul Food: L'Anima

L'Anima is the Italian word for "the soul" or "the spirit", and it's unusual to find ethereal connotations attached to modern Italian cuisine. Restaurateurs like to emphasise the earthiness, the spicy peasantness, the down-home, hairy-armpitted, beans-and-pasta-soup-iness of vero Italian cooking. You may think it laughable that the River Café calls its fabulous dishes cucina rustica, when no actual rustic Italian could afford a tenth of their Hammersmith prices – but the image was seriously meant.

Francesco Mazzei, the chef behind L'Anima, has the right credentials for offering authentic grub: he's from Calabria in the toe of Italy, where he grew up making olive oil with his mother and ice-cream with his uncle. His family, by all accounts, were the kind of colourful throng that we know from a hundred movie scenes. But Sgnr Mazzei is an experienced London cook, having cut his teeth at the Dorchester in Park Lane and the Corbin-and-King showcase, St Alban, off Piccadilly Circus. He has travelled a lot, adapting recipes from Calabria, Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia and even north Africa. So does L'Anima bring Italian soul food to middle-class British diners?

The restaurant is in Broadgate, that soulless region near Liverpool Street Station, where the buildings are all banks and lofty cranes hang the blue evening sky. Claudio Silvestrin, the architect, has designed a stunning interior: the glass frontage is immense, the back wall is brown porphyry, the floors off-white limestone travertine, the kitchen wall geometric marble slabs, the lights are long dangling wands, the furniture is heavy on white leather and the napery is as pristine as swan's down. It's frightfully symbolic – brown and white, earth and clouds, body and soul. You'd call it minimalist, except that the bar area, with its luxurious sofas, is bloody enormous. It reminded me of Sydney restaurants, where they counter the sunlight outside by keeping colour to a minimum indoors. The dress code seemed predominantly City-suit black; a tall Milanese supermodel prowled between the tables.

From a menu full of unusual words (ministra? carasau? fregola? cavatelli?) I started with the zitoni, n'duja and aubergine. The waiter explained that zitoni is tubular pasta, n'duja is a sauce made of salami ("It's more intense than chorizo," he warned) and aubergine is aubergine – one big wide slice of it, wrapped around the pasta and smothered in meaty gunge. It was perfectly cooked, tasty, and rather ordinary: I was disappointed something so exotically named could be, basically, penne with a spicy sauce. My date, a reformed veggie, went into raptures about the beef carpaccio: "Utterly gorgeous, so soft, light and delicate. I've always thought of meat as coarse and chewy, but this dissolves on the tongue." To celebrate her re-discovered tastebuds, I ordered, from an interesting, mainly Italian wine list, a 2004 Amarone: it's what Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs, chooses to drink with human flesh ("I ate his liver with some fava beans and big Amarone" – though in the film they change it, pathetically, to "a nice Chianti"). It was stunning, crammed with plums and hints of leather and liquorice and, later, toffee.

My "aged beef tagliata, marrow bones and mash" was dramatically presented – floppy slices of super-rare manzo came draped like smoky tarpaulins over a thick marrow bone, to resemble a fat mushroom. The beef, in a pool of its own juices, was heaven, and, amazingly, did taste "aged" – it was redolent of some ancient cloister with hymn books and a whiff of incense. My friend's fish stew with Sardinian fregola – a version of couscous – was "very hale and hearty, spicy but not overpowering", crammed with clams and mussels (the latter spiced like a Thai dish) with thyme, oregano and zest of lemon. It's an indication of the kitchen's excellence that they should take such pains over the zucchini side-dish – tiny strips of courgette dipped in milk and deep-fried for a few seconds, so that they resemble whitebait and are miraculously crunchy.

We shared a pudding called mangia e bevi – literally "eating and drinking" – a concoction of strawberry jelly, fruit sorbet and cream, with blackberries and blueberries. Its name jokily warns that, though it's technically something to eat, if you leave it five minutes, it'll melt and become something to drink. Very nice it was too, balancing sweet jelly with tart blackcurrant; but was hard to distinguish from English trifle, with sorbet standing in for custard.

This is a ravishing addition to the London restaurant scene. If the food isn't quite as spiritual, or as excitingly innovative, as you're led to expect, it's certainly good enough to justify a night out among the City boys and the supermodels.

L’Anima, 1 Snowden Street, London EC2 (020-7422 7000)

Food
Ambience
Service

Around £130 for two, with wine

Side orders
Talking Italian

By Madeleine Lim

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