‘Simple yet compelling’: Noci’s spring silk handkerchiefs with asparagus, wild garlic, walnuts and confit egg yolk. (That said, I’d rather be down the Binley Mega Chippy than eat nine courses in a room filled with angel investors and hedge-fund managers for a £300 minimum entry fee.) Fine dining, I fear, will soon be only for multimillionaires, so places such as Noci are vital. For finer dining, we are now in the era of £250-plus-a-deposit tasting menus, with extra up front for “incidentals” – pay it or buzz off. Even so, I chose to visit Noci partly because its pricing felt relatively sane compared with many other restaurants at the moment. We can visualise this in our mind’s eye, and know that 100g is that abstemious serving we permitted ourselves when 300g would have been just the ticket. It’s a mistake to tell anyone who knows their way around the 1980s Weight Watchers pamphlet that you serve pasta in 100g portions. “The pasta mains are quite, um, small,” a different server informed me as I perused the £14.50 lamb ravioli. Once you step inside, it is vast, family-friendly and has menu pricing that makes my eyes only semi-roll in astonishment, which is increasingly rare. It’s a fantastic location for the Business Design Centre crowd, and for after-workers wanting dinner before jumping on the 73 bus home.
Noci is a casual Italian restaurant on that pretty, green part of Islington’s Upper Street, the bit with the Waterstones and Bellanger brasserie, and handy for tourists to see everything the area has to offer. Noci’s brown butter ziti cacio e pepe: ‘Posh macaroni cheese with a Clarendon Instagram filter.’