Dishes do have their moments, don’t they? Little tickles of hype-fuelled flippancy, doses of fashion like so many frocks.
The one currently having its moment is lasagne (or lasagna, if you live in Bromsgrove in reality but Brooklyn in your head). Not that it ever really went away, but suddenly it’s the dish of the day.
The cyclical nature of food trends is often dictated by affordability, for both chefs and diners. Lasagne is cheap, relatively speaking. Smashburgers came back to the fore last year for much the same reason. The same with monkfish some years ago.
All these gourmet sandwiches doing the rounds also qualify. They are fanciful, big and brash, elegantly made with elaborate fillings in expensive bread. But they are still sandwiches.
They feel luxurious, but still only cost a tenner or thereabouts. We need things like this to sustain us, but they grant us licence, too, to feel that life is worth living.
Lasagne is now taking its turn in an ongoing churn where chefs, restaurateurs – anyone in the food game, in fact – falls back on a proponent of certainty, one intended to bring about some semblance of calm amid the storm. Because who doesn’t like lasagne? More to the point, most people can afford it. It’s no caviar, no Dover sole. It’s all the better for it.
One restaurant is betting on lasagne more than most. Senza Fondo! in London (other cities should brace for expansion) is building an entire brand on it, serving unlimited – seriously – portions for £20 per head.
Never mind that the lasagne has attracted some sniffy reviews (“a gimmick best ignored” said the Standard), the place is booked out for the next three months. Yeah, the unlimited pasta for the price of a Nando’s might have something to do with it, but I’m not convinced there’s a better food to do it with. Comforting? Lasagne defines the word.
Of course Senza Fondo! has caused online drama. What content creator doesn’t want to be seen to be eating endless portions of meat folded softly between sheets of pasta, the latter curled and eggy yellow, the mince imbued in deep red, shimmering, glistening below a creamy canopy? You can hardly blame the TikTokers for taking up space, or moan about founder Joe Worthington for cashing in on the trend.
The fact he calls himself “Chief Béchamel Officer” is abhorrent, though. Yet the fact he’s putting on £5 Negronis for customers until their food arrives shows he’s clearly among the savviest newcomers to the industry.
But the great lasagne boom is more than just Senza Fondo! There are countless restaurants, high-end, mid- and beyond, providing solace to the struggling by way of the 14th-century classic that begs, borrows and steals from numerous Italian regions.
There is traditional lasagne but also yesterday’s slices, deep-fried and served as nuggets to be dipped in marinara sauce or aioli or both. Jackson Boxer’s, made with taleggio and truffle and found at his casual Notting Hill restaurant Dove might be the best, but you don’t have to look far to find something similar. Lasagne is everywhere right now, served any which way.
But I must direct you to Cafe Verona, Moorgate, an Anglo-Italian cafe and sandwich bar which has been there since anyone can remember. Pound for pound, it does the best British-style lasagne around, superior to any other I’ve tried in town.
At Cafe Verona, the pasta is soft; the mince is coarse and simple; the tomato sauce resolute but far from elegant or singing of San Marzano; the béchamel is thick, boundless and generous; the comfort is everything.
A portion costs much less than £20 (a little over a tenner, in fact) and who needs more than one anyway, really? I reckon I could do three on the bounce but I’d suffer for it. I am not Garfield the cat, nor that once-deranged eating machine Adam Richman, who used to devour whole cities for the purposes of good telly.
No, I shall return, happily, to Cafe Verona, and enjoy lasagne as it is meant to be here: unceremonious; just dinner, without the faff.
