The Guardian
Grace Dent lunched at a “enormous new ‘Italian’ restaurant” that is “apparently designed to take money from people with money”. It offers a “sparse, and oddly uninspiring” menu, beginning with breakfast which includes “buttermilk chicken waffles and cornbread with organic Nama Yasai berry jam, though, curiously, not much in the way of fine Italian pastries or coffee”.
Main dishes were generally “lacklustre” and under-seasoned, while tiramisu was “neatly stacked, precise and pretty… plated as if it’s off to Royal Ascot on top of someone’s head” – but joyless.
“Alone in my quiet restaurant hell”, Grace deduced that her “sombre-looking” fellow diners were City types on client or team lunches, eating forlornly with “people they had nothing in common with”. “Campanelle is a great illustration of the pros of working from home.”
Grace Dent - 2025-09-21The Times
Jay Rayner dined at a spacious new Italian restaurant in the former London Shipping Exchange where, he advised, you need to sit facing the street to take in the “creamy grandeur of the Grade II listed building”. Face the other way and your view is of the atrium of a sprawling new office development: “somebody’s idea of elegant and my idea of hell”.
There is a menu of “quality if unshowy Italian food of the sort you can talk over rather than talk about, priced at whatever the neighbourhood will bear… Think Club Class Italian.” Mostly of the dishes Jay ate were forgettable, with the exception of “a couple of high points”: angel hair pasta with ceps fried in butter was “an enticing shade of autumnal beige and has bite and slurp in equal measure”; thin-cut zucchini fritti were equally good.
One the debit side, “we have the calamari e gamberi, which means prawns, plural, but there is just the one. I cut it in half to share with my companion. When you find yourself counting items of seafood there is a problem, however greaselessly fried it happens to be”. This wasn’t a one-off omission: a skewer billed as ‘prawns, scallops & squid’ also had a single solitary scallop.
Jay Rayner - 2025-10-05
