Hello. It’s Sunday which means it’s technically time for a post for paid subscribers, but I thought it was high time I sat myself down and wrote about a bloody restaurant for once in my rotten life, so today everyone’s getting a review, and paid subs will get something nice next week instead.*

Okay, so. Dining Out. It has been a little while hasn’t it? I needed a breather, and I appreciate your patience (not that I expect that anyone is actually sitting refreshing their phone lest they miss me making jokes about small plates and calling things “the David Beckham of pie” or whatever else it is I go on about on here, but you know what I mean). I was, however, never going to go away for too long (sorry), and recently I went to eat somewhere great with a friend on a warm evening, which is of course my catnip, so I felt the itch to tell you about it. As such, tentatively, I would like here to cite an ancient adage, if I may: we are so back.

The “somewhere great” in question was Lupa, which is a new Italian restaurant in Highbury that I really enjoyed – it’s compact, with a food offering that punches above the weight you’d expect from a kitchen this tiny, and it is, by all accounts a nice place to exist for a bit: bright on long summer stretches, and little enough that I imagine it’ll feel properly cosy when it gets colder.

You might have read about Lupa so far because one of the partners financing it is Theo James (aggressively hot man from White Lotus season two), and I will be honest: the look of the place is sort of like someone put “what if Theo James had a restaurant” into an AI generator. It’s very understatedly glamorous – the wait staff look like Hollywood actors – in the very literal sense that one guy deadass could have been Austin Butler on first glance – and the decor is pared back and pointedly tasteful. It’s very, like, Aesop, if you get me (like, by September this gaff will hate to see a creative directors on a third date coming)? The food, however, which is billed as “Roman comfort food” is less mannered, and I think that makes for a good balance.

My trip to Lupa was, as I say, on a sunny evening just over a week ago, and after a little hiatus from such frivolities, I was ready to have a vintage Lovely Time, so I put on a pair of stupid gingham shorts and some knee high boots, and was joined by my pal Elise, who is great company when you want to have a laugh because she’s so good at it, it should be her job. She arrived wearing a boob tube with a frog on it and I was like, “hwfg.”

I began with the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Lovely Times: a little cig, a little focaccia-and-fennel-salami plate, and a little house martini to wash it down (cig: 8/10; bread and meat: also 8/10, a pickle would have taken it over the top; martini: 7/10 because I’m usually a vodka woman and this was gin, and also because I personally take them slightly wet – i.e. with more vermouth to take the edge off – so this was a bit too acrid for me). Once these rites had been performed, we went about the business of ordering: we picked tomato salad and fried courgette flower with ricotta from the primi section, carbonara to share from the pasta bit, plus fish of the day (plaice) for me, and deep fried artichoke for my esteemed guest, plus roast potatoes and a side salad. If there’s one thing I am good at, it is choosing the components of a meal, and I have to say I absolutely smashed this one into the top corner from the halfway line.

The vibe at Lupa is relaxed, and I liked the pacing of this meal – nothing felt rushed, but the waits between courses felt just well-judged enough. Our primi course came out quite quickly – the salad spoke of well-sourced produce (the tomatoes weren’t watery and crap is what I’m saying) and the courgette flower was a sort of declaration that said “you might expect this place to be one thing, but it’s actually another”. The batter was light but kinda cheekily oily, and the ricotta filling, brought to life with herby flecks, was not skimped on, oozing out when we halved the flower down the middle. It told me that though I may have suspected differently from Lupa’s slightly reserved feel, this was to be the type of Italian food I love to eat – hearty, a bit messy, made with satisfaction in mind.

The pasta – a delightfully glossy heap on the plate, dotted with little rubies of guanciale, twinkling in the light with fat – confirmed these suspicions, because the big portion and the sensuality of the sauce passed my all important pasta vibes test first time. Pasta is a dish to be chomped down rather than admired, and the speed with which Elise and I were competitively spearing tubes of paccheri, and swirling them around in the thick, black pepper-heavy sauce was evidence enough of what side of that spectrum this stuff fell on.

Best of all, however, were the main courses. I am a sucker for simplicity done confidently, and that’s what you get at Lupa: a fillet of plaice came with a big old plateful of citrusy butter sauce, artichokes as pretty as flowers were cooked in exactly the way they taste best (deep fried brother), and the mustard dressing on the radicchio salad was so fiery and addictive that it levelled a side order up into the best thing on the table (seriously, get this salad). I could have taken a little bit more of an outer-crisp-to-inner-fluff ratio on the potatoes, but really I’m splitting hairs, because if you thought I wasn’t picking those spuds up and dipping them into my leftover sauce, you would be gravely mistaken.

We ended with a slice of ricotta tart to share, topped with seasonal fruit, which in this case were peaches (and can I just stop for a minute and ask: have you lot eaten peaches recently? They taste fucking sensational. It’s out of this world. I am one more revelatory peach away from mounting Speaker’s Corner and just going “HAVE YOU HAD THESE???” to everyone who passes). The fruit was sweet, the cheese brought slightly tart creaminess, and it was all laid on a thin but substantial pastry which tasted almost biscuity, so the effect was kind of like a hyper Gucci version of a Biscoff cheesecake.

Of course the ambience of a June evening absolutely added to the glow of total pleasantness about the whole endeavour, but as I say, I don’t think that any of this was a fluke: it’ll be just as good in December when you’re bumping elbows as you crack into a gigantic swirl of porchetta over the table. There’s refinement at Lupa – those high shine pasta sauces, for example, are things of ridiculous skill – but there’s room given to the physicality that makes Italian food so irresistible to a lot of us, too. If you want my advice, I think you should go along with someone you fancy, feel smug that you’ve hit the perfect balance between chill and sexy, and then share a cacio e pepe so enthusiastically that you both get sauce on your chin. While it might seem a bit self-serious on first glance, there’s absolutely a good time to be had here – one bite of the food, I reckon, lets you know that Lupa is for enjoying.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.

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