Bancone is a pasta restaurant – just don’t call it Italian
A new restaurant below the imposing walls of the Bank of England is serving pasta – just don’t call this Italian food. I’m told the rare breed beef and marrowbone pasta is a British dish. Is a restaurant Italian because they serve pasta? As any City worker will know, Bancone’s silken threads are kneaded in the window of the restaurant, which is next to The Ned on Princes Street. They’re hardly flown in still wringing with the sweat of Neapolitan nonnas.
Anyway, I’ll leave it to you to decide what cuisine this pasta is – you can thank me later if you end up having a bizarre argument about provenance with your friend over dinner at Bancone. To be fair, it is a fascinating world: the Jikoni chef Ravinder Bhogal said her publishers were terrified when she insisted on calling her recipe book “inauthentic immigrant food,” but her point was that food’s identity, like language, is in how it adapts as it travels around the world. There is no such thing as ‘authentic’ food.
There is certainly such a thing as banging pasta. Bancone – a slick, modern looking restaurant with plenty of natural light and a decent hum of energy created from an energetic post-work crowd and an electro-rock playlist – has plenty of it. Everything is made in house.
We started with the tuna tartare, pepped up with chill oil and lemon and a gorgeous Endive, carrot and Calabrian chilli yogurt salad, which both had real punch. Not what you expect at a pasta restaurant, but as you’ll have gathered by now, Bancone likes to be different.
Bancone: Handmade pasta, every day
From the pasta mains, everything is probably terrible for you, and there’s no getting away from that. Lean into it. We mixed straightforward with inventive – the chilli, garlic, parsley spaghetti ‘alla chitarra’ was gentle and predictable, the silk handkerchiefs with walnut butter and confit egg yolk the Instagram moment, the spicy pork and nduja ragu tagliatelle something more akin to what you might find in Italy. The best was the Herdwick hogget, with pappardelle, soy and Thai basil. Blow-your-head-off rich mutton (young mutton, one to two-years-old sheep) that is just hugely boisterous and intriguing. I sucked every small piece of meat for way longer than is socially acceptable, like a weirdo, folding inches of pasta around the mutton.
Cocktails are experimental twists on the classics, like the margarita with apricot and melon high ball with sauvignon blanc and cantelupe, which are talking points – not that Bancone needs anymore of those.
The only thing I didn’t love was that at 10.15 the lights came up and the music went off, like closing time at a club. We hadn’t finished but we felt like we had to leave, even though there was more of our wine left (a very nice bottle of Amarone courtesy of a ‘City’ specials wine list full of the posh stuff). So much for late night in the Square Mile – perhaps that’s something else for you to talk about.
• To book a table at Bancone, visit the website here