Mid Italian
Simran Hans reviews Lupa and Carmela's, and asks whether celebs and influencers should be opening restaurants. Photographed by Michaël Protin.
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As I waited for my table at Lupa to be ready, I noticed several passers-by peering in. ‘What is this place? It’s adorable!’ I heard one of them squeal. A new Italian restaurant in north London, Lupa would like you to think of it as a neighbourhood joint. Located in Highbury Park, it is a medium-to-long walk from all three of its nearest tube stations (11 minutes from Arsenal, 16 from Finsbury Park, 18 from Highbury and Islington), which is perfect for locals and annoying for anyone who doesn’t live nearby. It is an intimate space, seating just 28 covers, with coquettish half-curtained windows and an inviting, butter-yellow facade.
Except Lupa is not really a neighbourhood restaurant. It is a celebrity interloper, dressed in a baseball cap and sunglasses. Co-owned by The White Lotus actor Theo James, a Highbury transplant from Buckinghamshire who spends half his time in Los Angeles, it has been booked solid since it opened in June. A friend who actually lives in the neighbourhood was unable to secure a reservation for her birthday in August. Determined, she turned up at 5pm sharp to assess the walk-in situation. Two other diners had already beaten her to it.
The tastefully decorated space does not draw attention to James’s involvement, but Lupa’s PR campaign has certainly traded on it. The place is co-owned by Carousel’s Ed Templeton, but it’s James’s name that is front and centre of allthereviews. Today, to fill a restaurant in London, you need more than the promise of good food. What you need is a fanbase. I was reminded of this when visiting Carmela’s, another newly opened Italian restaurant in Islington. A pizzeria serving ‘East Coast-inspired’ pies, it is co-owned by vlogging duo Gerry del Guercio and Paul Delaney, better known as BiteTwice (and on Instagram, where they have 163,000 followers, as @bitetwicefoodreviews). The ‘East Coast’ concept essentially refers to the thin base, foldable New York style, with a nod to the chewy, charred crust of its New Haven cousin ‘apizza’. I ate at Carmela’s a week after it opened. Like Lupa, it was packed.
Reaching a specific audience through the shrewd use of social media is hardly a new phenomenon. What’s novel here is the thing that’s being sold. In London and at its outer edges, the last five years have seen East Coast-inspired pizza taking off as an antidote to Neapolitan hegemony: Dough Hands, Crisp, Lenny’s Apizza, Alley Cats, Gracey’s and Vincenzo’s each offer an iteration. And BiteTwice has reviewed them all. It’s impressive fieldwork for opening a bricks-and-mortar space on Upper Street, which is home to at least six other restaurants where you can sit in and order a pizza. Selling intangible expertise – or a dream, or an idea – is very different to selling a product people will keep coming back to eat. But there is an awkward tension between the global online fan and the local customer in real life. They both have different expectations and needs. One expects fireworks – the sort that demands a photo. The other needs something to eat.