Vittles Reviews: Long Live The Pasta Boyfriend!
"It’s rare for things to be this bad this soon." Hester van Hensbergen on Jordon Ezra King’s residency at Isla. Photographs by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Hester van Hensbergen.
Before we get to today’s review, a reminder that you can still pre-order issue 1 of Vittles magazine through our website here if you’re in the UK or US — it is currently discounted to £18 (or £16 if you are a paid subscriber).
We are also excited to announce that we now have distribution worldwide via Antenne Books, which means that the magazine will be available upon release via bookshops. For trade orders, both in the UK and abroad, please email maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com (or harass your local bookshop into ordering some copies!)
PSA: We have reached peak Pasta Boyfriend. The Pasta Boyfriend is Brooklyn Beckham gouging the creamy heart out of an entire parmesan wheel and filling it with spaghetti for his lactose-intolerant fiancée. The Pasta Boyfriend is the legion of men on Hinge who believe their ability to make fresh pasta is the essence of their sexual appeal. The Pasta Boyfriend is convinced he is partly Italian (occasionally he is Italian). And the Pasta Boyfriend wants his spaghetti at a little place he’s just discovered, which is called Regency Café. Somewhere nearby, perhaps even terrifyingly close, is your Pasta Boyfriend, and he’s telling you in dulcet tones that saving the last of the pasta water is the secret to a silky sauce, while he gently cracks an egg into a well of flour and gazes into the rising white dust.
The Pasta Boyfriend’s Pasta Boyfriend, though, is chef Jordon Ezra King. Formerly a star of recipe platform Mob Kitchen, the now fully certified Independent Mobster and ‘45th Generation Roman’ is cooking shapes the other Pasta Boyfriends have never even heard of and posing with shiny loafers and trainers at E. Pellicci, London’s most storied East End Italian café. He knows the virtues of dry pasta as well as fresh, and he knows how to hold a phone to his head and look busy with it. He’s also an inquisitive, funny and sometimes lyrical food writer. But the question is, how well can the Mobster cook?
To find out, I went to the opening night of King’s chef residency) at The Standard Hotel’s restaurant Isla, near King’s Cross. It’s the former site of Camden council’s offices and a majestic feat of brutalist (formerly) public architecture. Now, the downstairs restaurant, which is next to the Seventies-style reading lounge stocked with books from the closed council library, runs regular residencies with chef-influencers. King’s stint is sponsored by Campari and follows on from Ixta Belfrage’s well-publicised three-month residency last year; likely no coincidence since they share the same talent agent in Juiced World’s Nas Sherifi.
Our table at Jordon King x Isla was ready soon after we arrived. It wasn’t the one we’d booked on the terrace, since that was now occupied by a private party, but another one next to the roaring fireplace inside. Looking at the surrounding empty tables, and then at each other, we made a silent agreement to commit to the night’s fever dream, peeled away all but the last layer of clothing and sat down. Our waiter explained that King was a ‘culinary extraordinaire’ with Roman heritage. ‘I like these,’ said one of my friends about the four water glasses she set down on our table. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you put one in your bag,’ she replied. With a glint in her eye, she then suggested we could have the wine glasses too, before padding quietly off, not to be seen again until after dessert. Our food, unfortunately, arrived quickly.