Luca

Luca. British seasonal ingredients through an italian lens. From Isaac McHale and The Clove Club.

Luca

Salads and small plates, Camparisoda and freshly shaken cocktails.

The bar at Luca is a separate space, perfect for a drop-in bite with bar snacks, small plates and pasta.

You are welcome for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Open Monday to Saturday from 8.00 – 11.00 for breakfast, then from 12.00 – late with an express lunch offer / pre-theatre menu until 18.30 then we serve our a la carte menu.

We take reservations in the bar from 12.00 – 18.15pm, after this time you do not need a reservation.

https://luca.restaurant

Restaurant review: Luca is the Italian nobody expected from The ...

A permanent restaurant inevitably followed; McHale’s The Clove Club at Shoreditch Town Hall sent the foodie world into dizzy raptures.

Not many restaurants can claim to be truly influential, but it’s hard to imagine Lee Wescott’s Typing Room, or Adam Handling’s The Frog without The Clove Club.

And last summer, while everybody was busy wringing their hands about what a terrible year 2016 had been, The Clove Club became only the third British entry into the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list (McHale’s former gig, the Ledbury, being one of the others).

Our waiter – a tall, posh, rosy-cheeked chap whose tragus piercing hints that he was probably one of the cooler kids in his public school – explained that the menu is structured the Italian way, with antipasti followed by primi and secondi courses.

Traditional Italian mains – often just islands of meat or fish unanchored from the rich flavours of previous courses – can struggle to impress the neanderthal British palate, and Luca doesn’t go the whole hog.

Review: Luca, London's New 'Britalian' Restaurant | Londonist

Looking around the dining room at Luca is rather like casting your beadies over a good handbag; from a distance, it looks very similar to other handbags, but when you examine more closely, the quality becomes clear: a beautiful finish on a buckle, excellent stitching, quality leather.

The dining room at Luca, at first, feels like it could be anywhere, until you notice the bevelled edges on the tables, the art deco styling, elegant cutlery, and the little gold clip-tray that pinches your bill.

We've seen some good quality Italians in London, particularly in recent years, but at Luca, they're doing something slightly different — serving a British menu, 'seen through an Italian lens'.

We start with some fluffy Parmesan 'chips' which are the snack you'll most associate with the clever, playful cooking at Shoreditch's Clove Club (Isaac McHale, Daniel Willis and Johnny Smith of that restaurant are also behind this new venture).

The problem is that if you're going to open a restaurant off the back of somewhere like the Michelin-starred Clove Club, people are going to want wow, and when what they get is a plate of rather bland fish and a bill that's £110 without any drinks or desserts, they could get a little pissed off.

Luca - London, LDN | Tock

Luca serves modern Italian food using British ingredients.

The restaurant is open six days a week and focuses on antipasti and pasta, observing the deeply established traditions of Italian food, but breaking the rules a little.

The rest of the day it focuses on finger foods, sharing plates and freshly shaken...+ More

Luca, London: Restaurant Review - olive magazine

It presents Clerkenwell diners with modern Italian food, cooked using British ingredients and served by waiters who know the food inside out.

Emulsified salted pollock, lighter and more subtle than salt cod, with peppers, olives and croutons is a comforting assembly of classic Mediterranean flavours; a salad of castelfranco, pear, shaved fennel and toasted hazelnut shows the kitchen’s light touch.

The prices at Luca are steep, and as such the waiting staff’s suggestion of three antipasti, three pastas and two mains between two would only have made this worse.

Fennel, pear and toasted hazelnut salad was a generous portion, light, fresh and crunchy.

Luca is friendly, relaxed and modern, and makes the most of fresh British produce with some outstanding dishes, particularly the seafood and the pasta.

Fay Maschler reviews Luca: Clove Club's Italian offspring comes ...

Mincing up fat-free end-of-season grouse (the little birds can breathe easy from the 10th) to fill ravioli then making a sauce with dilute potato and whisky is a notion that is more appealing in a consciousness-raising session than on the plate.

His menu is divided into the four courses germane to a traditional Italian meal and if you add a pasta — typical price £14 — to a main — typical price £24 — you have the makings of a big bill on your hands.

Although it is only offered on the bar menu, it is worth ordering (for £4) the outstanding tough-crusted loose-textured bread served with resoundingly green Fontodi organic olive oil.

Spaghettini with Morecambe Bay shrimp and mace butter is limp first time around and at the second meal (ordered by a friend who won’t play by the rules) wet.

Cornish lamb chops at Luca arrive resembling an English main course of meat and two veg plus some rosemary breadcrumbs that lack edge.

Luca, London EC1: 'It's an exciting mongrel marriage' – restaurant ...

‘The second outing from the team behind the Clove Club is a departure: this time, they’ve come over all Italian.

This second outing for the team behind the Clove Club, chef Isaac McHale with Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis front of house, was always going to be under the beadiest of scrutiny.

It’s an exciting, mongrel marriage: spaghettini with Morecambe Bay shrimp and mace butter brings delicate but al dente pasta and a sauce of the finest potted shrimps blitzed to giddy, bisquey, buttery oblivion, with added crunch from fried breadcrumbs.

A secondo of Hereford rump steak is more Brit: crisp little kalettes (that delicious kale-sprout hybrid), salsify crunchy and rich with butter, barrels of ripely mineral meat hiding slivers of smoky pancetta slicked with a very un-Puritan kale sauce.

A few restaurant biz insiders have whispered to me about their disappointment with Luca, muttering “Why are these guys doing Italian?”