Bocca di Lupo

Bocca Di Lupo - home

We specialise in the obscure and the delicious highlights of food and wine from all across Italy's twenty regions.

If we can make something ourselves, we do - gelati, breads, sausages, salame, pickles, mostarda, and pasta of course - the rest is carefully sourced from Italy.

http://www.boccadilupo.com

Bocca Di Lupo - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

Near Piccadilly Circus, a versatile and attractive Italian restaurant that's one of the best openings of the year to-date; its ex-Moro team serves up unusual and accomplished Italian dishes, and the wine list is notable too.

Interesting, the location of this Soho newcomer is not.

A long, Carrara marble bar flanks the room providing separation from a shiny and bustling open kitchen.

Boy was it good: meaty yet light; rich but fresh-tasting.

It may sound vile, but the reality was just an offbeat chocolate pot that was - all things considered - hard to separate from every other gooey chocolatey pudding you've ever had before.

Classics Revisited: Bocca di Lupo

It’s the sort of never-thought-of-that detail that is typical of a restaurant that has set the agenda for how we currently want to eat Italian.

Bocca di Lupo translates as "the mouth of the wolf" and means "good luck" in a break-a-leg kind of way.

In 2008, luck is something which an Italian restaurant owned by a 28-year-old British chef, opening in a scuzzy corner of Soho at the height of the credit crunch, seemed in dire need of.

But walk into Bocca when service is at full pelt and you see straightaway that you don’t need luck when you’re blessed with Jacob Kenedy’s instinct for creating a place where people want to spend their time and money – an instinct that the chef honed working at Moro.

Like many windowless spaces, it is an easy place in which to lose track of time, not least because you don’t want to walk out on an atmosphere of such carefree carousing.

Bocca di Lupo restaurant review 2009 January London | Italian ...

The menu criss-crosses Italian regions, with most dishes available either in starter or main course sizes.

The mostly but not exclusively Italian wine list has plenty of choices under £30, and mark ups are fair.

Examples are Napa valley Cuviason Pinot Noir 2006 at £37.50 for a wine that will set you back around £20 in the shops, Cometa Planeta 2007 at £40.75 for a wine that costs about £18 retail, and at the higher end Brunello Rennina Col d’Orica 1990 at £107.50 for a wine that costs around £60 in the shops.

Other starters sampled include a good salad of radish, celeriac and Pecorino with pomegranates and truffle oil, and fried eel and red prawns with white polenta with tasty prawns but surprisingly tasteless eel.

Cream of red prawn risotto with basil was made with good stock, but why leave the shells on the prawns?

Bocca Di Lupo - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

Near Piccadilly Circus, a versatile and attractive Italian restaurant that's one of the best openings of the year to-date; its ex-Moro team serves up unusual and accomplished Italian dishes, and the wine list is notable too.

Interesting, the location of this Soho newcomer is not.

A long, Carrara marble bar flanks the room providing separation from a shiny and bustling open kitchen.

Boy was it good: meaty yet light; rich but fresh-tasting.

It may sound vile, but the reality was just an offbeat chocolate pot that was - all things considered - hard to separate from every other gooey chocolatey pudding you've ever had before.

Bocca di Lupo review - Calabrese menu

The buzzEvery foodie in London has heard of Bocca di Lupo, the convivial Italian restaurant opened by Jacob Kenedy and Victor Hugo in 2008.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The lowdownThe restaurant is known for regularly switching up its menus (at least once a week) according to the availability of seasonal produce.

In terms of cuisine, Calabria is famed for simple, flavoursome dishes created in its fertile terrain and warm climate; chilli peppers, nduja salami and aubergines are all big news.

Moving on to the main dishes, it's hard to choose which of the mouthwatering pasta plates to choose, but we'd recommend the following - the spaghetti with clams, chilli and garlic (so simple, yet so delectable) and also the risotto with girolle mushrooms and garlic.

It may well be the best Italian restaurant in London.Bocca di Lupo, 12 Archer St, Soho, London W1D 7BB...

Classics Revisited: Bocca di Lupo

It’s the sort of never-thought-of-that detail that is typical of a restaurant that has set the agenda for how we currently want to eat Italian.

Bocca di Lupo translates as "the mouth of the wolf" and means "good luck" in a break-a-leg kind of way.

In 2008, luck is something which an Italian restaurant owned by a 28-year-old British chef, opening in a scuzzy corner of Soho at the height of the credit crunch, seemed in dire need of.

But walk into Bocca when service is at full pelt and you see straightaway that you don’t need luck when you’re blessed with Jacob Kenedy’s instinct for creating a place where people want to spend their time and money – an instinct that the chef honed working at Moro.

Like many windowless spaces, it is an easy place in which to lose track of time, not least because you don’t want to walk out on an atmosphere of such carefree carousing.

Restaurant review: Bocca di Lupo | Life and style | The Guardian

All of which is a long-winded and slightly imbecilic local radio link contrived to introduce Bocca di Lupo, a newcomer to Soho, whose name translates to "mouth of the wolf" (colloquial Italian for "good luck", apparently, after the fashion of "break a leg").

This is one of those precious places that instil confidence the moment you walk through the door, thanks to a charming and amusing maître d' (a certain Victor Hugo, no less, formerly of Moro) and the mellifluous buzz of punters relishing their food, cooked, in this case, by another Moro alumnus, a precocious and hugely talented 28-year-old called Jacob Kenedy According to a faintly pretentious website ("Take almond granita from Sicily, with its sweet whisper of the Barbary shore..."), Kenedy scoured Italy for authentically regional dishes, which are listed alongside their provinces.

My rack of lamb with caponata, a Sicilian dish, looked wonderful, with mauvey blood seeping from the magnificent meat.

Taking a well-earned break from musing on how Italian wines "tell tales of their native soil" (no one loves a telltale), that website insists, "It's the taste of honest Italian food that will bring you back to Bocca di Lupo" and I really cannot put it better.

Fritto di mare (small plate) £8.50 Spaghettini with mussels £7 Gnocchi with sausage ragù £8.50 Rack of lamb with caponata £18.50 Artichoke alla Giudia £5 500ml carafe Castello di Pomino £21.50 500ml carafe pinot nero classico £19 Subtotal £88 Service @ 12.5% £11 Total £99

Jay Rayner reviews Bocca di Lupo | Life and style | The Guardian

Bocca di Lupo 12 Archer Street, London W1 020 7734 2223 Meal for two, including wine and service, £80-£120 The menu at Bocca di Lupo - literally "the mouth of the wolf" - reads like a wine list.

More important is the second "wine list" element of this menu: that almost every dish is available in small plates costing around a fiver and large plates at double that - or by the glass and the bottle.

If a good dish comes along - and many of the dishes here really are very good indeed - you are simply left wanting more, which is never a bad thing.

We were also intrigued rather than thrilled by a dessert of sanguinaccio, a sweet pâté made of pig's blood and chocolate from Abruzzo which I ordered because, well, I'm like that.

But the chestnut and the pistachio gelatos were the real thing, and a sundae made with a chocolate sorbet and a smooth granita of burnt almonds more than made up for the diversion into sweetened pig's blood.

Bocca di Lupo | Restaurants in Soho, London

The buzz is as important as the food at this enduringly popular Soho restaurant, but the food can be pretty memorable too.

The buzz is as important as the food at Jacob Kenedy and Victor Hugo’s enduringly popular Soho restaurant.

The menu is a slightly confusing mix of small and large plates to share and, amid the noise, it can be unclear what you think you’ve ordered and at what point it might arrive.

We have fond memories of buttery brown shrimp on soft, silky white polenta (the Venetian preference), and a deep-fried mix of calamari, soft-shell crab and lemon.