Can you truly recreate the osteria in Soho?
Bartolomeo Sala reviews Osteria Vibrato and reflects on how an Italian osteria might come in new, unexpected forms. Photography by Tommaso Serra.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Reviews, a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants You can read all the previous reviews here.
Today’s review is by Bartolomeo Sala, for whom the social and local importance of the osteria holds a personal and longstanding significance. So last month, when one the buzziest restaurants to open this year landed on Soho’s Greek Street, the word ‘osteria’ in its name made him feel uneasy…
Preserving the Fire
Bartolomeo Sala reviews Osteria Vibrato, Soho’s new Italian restaurant, and reflects on how the importance of an Italian osteria might come in new, unexpected forms. Photography by Tommaso Serra.
As someone who spent the best part of his late teens driving around the rolling hills of Piacenza in northern Italy looking for places to eat and drink, there are few things I like more than a good osteria. Born as a place for travellers to have wine and a quick bite before spending the night (the word itself comes from Old French for ‘host’), it co-evolved with its close relative the trattoria – a casual, family-run restaurant that focused on inexpensive, nourishing meals – and became the archetype of Italian conviviality in the postwar years: the place where old, local food traditions met with a new form of popular, cross-class form of hedonism.
I hope you will pardon this preamble, but you have to understand that the osteria represents something special to me. For a millennial who came of age after mass politics but before social media, it was my main form of socialisation, the setting for countless dates and piss-ups, hot summer evenings and foggy winter afternoons. It is also an integral part of the idea of the Italian countryside, for which I harbour a sentimental attachment. There is something about its jovial, laidback atmosphere that simply sets me right in a way that many self-serious modern restaurants never will. All this is to say that I felt uneasy when I saw the word in the context of the latest hyped-up Soho restaurant, Osteria Vibrato, which opened on Greek Street in February.