How to explain the charms of The Italian Job?
London’s first pub to devote itself to the Italian craft brewery scene is lovely even on the most standard of days. This is a pub in the distinctly Italian mould of being basically a high-design bar: blue tiling, raw brickwork, school desk-esque tables and distractingly well-groomed staff. Though Italian craft beer might be their one true love – and the solid range of draft and bottles the biggest attraction here – the wine list isn’t much less appealing. The food menu’s a seasonally changing miracle of things like sausage, pea and saffron arancini, or tomato and parmesan reginelle, and even in this era of the gastropub blows most other bar food out of the water. In the last year my handsome sidekick and I haven’t once made it to this side of town – deepest Chiswick – without winding up here at some point.
So: a great place on a normal day, and then tonight they’ve ramped up their charm-assault with the first Beer vs Wine Supperclub. Billed as a ‘delightful confrontation’, and thoroughly living up to that claim, this is a collaboration with the wine merchants of Passione Vino, each vying for the diner’s votes for their pairings against the three-course menu.
The food is, on its own merits, lovely – a wintry hat-trick of seafood, meat and chocolate – but the flavours drawn out by the beer and wine for each course transform the dinner into a thing worth haunting social media for news of the next supperclub installment.
The bottle-fermented Prosecco is generally voted to have triumphed over New Morning – the saison from Birrificio del Ducato – as a match for the octopus carpaccio, though it’s neck and neck. But the hoppy BiBock from Birrificio Italiano reclaims a point for beer, paired with the braised oxtail stew main course.
The castagnaccio, a Tuscan chestnut cake, is so simple, rich and grown-up that I imagine the chef doing a mic drop with his whisk when he finishes plating it up. Wine pulls un-recoupably into the lead here, with a glass of Greco di Bianco that even my Best Guy, whose devotion to craft beer knows no bounds, admits wins out – just – over the Chimera Belgian-style ale from Birrificio del Ducato. Our spirits charged up by the delightfulness of the confrontation, or possibly by the high ABV of the beer pairings, we linger for a nightcap after the supperclub wraps up to interrogate the managers about plans for the next event.
An on-site bottleshop is in the future for The Italian Job. A microbrewery should be; no word of that’s reached me so far but if I’m hopeful if I keep saying it then the idea will pick up some traction. In the meantime it’s still the best place in W4 to head with a loved one and a healthy appetite, and embed yourself for the winter.
The Italian Job, 13 Devonshire Road, London, W4 2EU. Website. The Italian Job’s next evening event is a craft beer and cheese tasting on 16 December. For bookings and more information, call 0208 9942852.
Photography (c) Arsenio M. Navarra.
