Osteria Angelina: Whisper it – could fusion food be back?
Osteria Angelina | Nicholls Clarke Yard, E1 6SH | ★★★★★
In the 15 years I’ve been writing about restaurants, few people have dared to drop the f-bomb. I’m not talking about sweary chefs mouthing off about a bad review (that’s happened a few times). No, I’m referring to a concept that is – should you believe the haters – at best gauche and at worst a cancellable offence. I am talking about “fusion food”.
Despite dating back as far as you care to look, the concept is indelibly linked to the 1980s, conjuring images of men in wide-shouldered suits sniffing coke in the bathrooms of New York restaurants. It’s the stuff you imagine Patrick Bateman and Gordon Gekko ordering because someone told them it was cool.
The phrase wasn’t actually coined until 1992, when American chef Norman Van Aken gave a famous speech at a food symposium in Santa Fe. This “Founding Father of New World Cuisine” was part of a movement that encompassed Wolfgang Puck, who opened Chinois (Chinese-French) in Santa Monica in 1983 and Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, who opened Nobu (Peruvian-Japanese) in Beverly Hills in 1987.
Suddenly everybody was at it. I remember fusion food being a buzzword even as a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Manchester, when I was more likely to be served Findus Crispy Pancakes than goats’ cheese dim sum. But eventually the excesses of the 1980s and 1990s gave way to the introspection of the 2000s. The opening of Noma in Copenhagen in 2003 ushered in an era of delicate, minimalist, hyper-local food served in restaurants hewn exclusively from natural materials. Noma coincided with the rise of social media and its blueprint replicated across the globe like a delicious virus. I’ve seen London menus that break down the provenance of ingredients to the kilometre.
Then it became political. In the heady pre-Trump days of 2015, when liberals were so convinced they had won the culture war they were cancelling things just for fun, a group of American students accused their university of cultural appropriation when a pulled pork and coleslaw sandwich was passed off as a Vietnamese banh mi. Messing with food from another culture was now an act of aggression. Straight to internet jail! A few years later Gordon Ramsay came under fire when he opened his Pan Asian restaurant Lucky Cat.
But fusion food is back, baby! Without shouting it from the rooftops – and often avoiding the f-word altogether – some of the best restaurants in London have been combining the flavours of great culinary nations and regions to brilliant effect, from Angelina (Japanese-Italian) to Ikoyi (West African-British) to Da Terra (Brazilian-Italian).
All of which brings me to Osteria Angelina, the bigger, shinier newborn sibling to the OG Angelina, transposed from Dalston to a handsome converted warehouse in Norton Folgate beside Spitalfields. Like the original restaurant, this is Italian with Japanese accents rather than Japanese with Italian accents (I feel there’s a joke about Super Mario to be shoehorned in here). And like the original, it’s superb.
The Fiancee had tipped them off that it was my birthday, so glasses of fizz were served on the terrace upon arrival – an excellent spot on a balmy evening – while our table was prepared. Out here we demolished some Hokkaido milk bread served in a little puddle of zingy apricot jam: absurdly tasty and a reassuring hint that these guys Know What They’re Doing.
“Crudo” of hamachi sashimi was the most obviously Japanese dish of the evening, the folds of fish relaxing in a pool of truffle soy and sprinkled with furikake. But from here, the Italians take the wheel: dainty little courgette flowers are stuffed with decadent miso ricotta; cod cheek fritters are fried in the super-light Japanese karaage method.
At this point we decanted ourselves into the restaurant itself, which was jumping on a Thursday evening, packed with a well-heeled, sensibly dressed crowd that shows how much Shoreditch has changed over the last few years. Hanging lanterns frame the open kitchen, occasionally lit by funnels of flame, but the decor is really just a neutral backdrop for the food.
The highlight is the pasta. After an agonising decision between six options, each alike in dignity, I plumped for three perfect little parcels of agnolotti stuffed with crab and sausage and coated in a thick, spicy bisque. I would love to hear any Italian purists try to argue this is anything but absolutely banging. Even better was the plate-sized raviolo with cured egg yolk, asparagus and shiitake, topped with generous wafers of black truffle and parmesan and some kind of crumb that I ate before I had a chance to properly identify it.
That’s a lot of rich food. You know what you don’t need after all that? A vast, beautiful, aged ribeye drizzled with, I think, miso butter. Superbly cooked, impeccably fatty. Ten out of ten, no notes. It could have fed four. I ate a couple of slices and had it boxed up.
One last surprise: an unexpectedly savoury cheese panna cotta topped with salty caviar, glistening beneath a single candle. Osteria Angelina may be cool, but it’s not too cool to sing happy birthday to a by-now-fairly-pissed journalist. If the Italian-Japanese concept has you doubting yourself, fear not, this is one of the openings of the year. The food is a subtle meeting of traditions, a smart mix of craft and creativity (a lazier writer might say it combines Italian flair with Japanese attention to detail but I am above such stereotypes) and the whole operation exudes confidence. If this is what fusion food looks like in 2025, I am here for it.
The next day I committed what many would consider an unforgivable sin against Italian culture: I took that boxed-up steak, sliced it up and served it through spaghetti. Meat and pasta? In the same dish? Mamma mia! It was delicious: I’m calling it fusion food.
• To book Osteria Angelina, visit the website here