It turns out that Naz Hassan is allergic to dust: not ideal for a head chef opening his second restaurant in a year. Broadsheet has dropped by new Wilton Way Italian ristorante Ornella a week before its first public service, and the place is still a building site: power tools, dangling wires, plastic sheets and, yes, a lot of dust.
Luckily, one of Ornella’s neighbours is the Wilton Way Deli: a Hackney institution that mixes a mean spritz. At one of its pavement tables, Hassan (liberated from the dust for an hour) is joined by Ornella co-owner Ed Templeton. Having co-founded Carousel with his brother Ollie, Templeton has lately become a serial restaurateur. Ornella is his third restaurant in a year – it’s only been a few months since he launched Cometa, a Mexican seafood joint in the former Carousel wine bar.
And the third member of the Ornella triumvirate? That would be the actor Theo James, of The Gentlemen and The White Lotus fame. James’s celebrity gave Ornella’s predecessor Lupa a welcome publicity boost, as Templeton acknowledges. “That certainly helped. But I think once we got over that, it actually became the thing that it was meant to be: this local spot.”
Lupa was inspired by the neighbourhood trattorias of Rome, with classic dishes like bucatini all’amatriciana and paccheri alla carbonara conjuring the Eternal City in an airy-but-tiny corner site near the Arsenal stadium. Despite his knack for cacio e pepe, though, head chef Hassan is no Roman – in fact, he was raised in Milan, and envisages Ornella as an ode to northern Italian food.
“We like Rome, don’t get me wrong,” Hassan says, laughing – but the chance to introduce Londoners to the classic dishes of Lombardy and Piedmont “touches a string in both mine and [Turinese sous chef] Alessandro [Boscolo’s] hearts”. The new restaurant is named after the late singer Ornella Vanoni, a Milanese icon whose grandson is a friend of Hassan’s.
Ornella’s opening menu confounds some Italian food cliches. For one thing, instead of olive oil, Milanese food goes big on dairy; Templeton jokes that Ornella is “everything you love about Lupa, but with more butter”.
There is pasta, of course: penne alla vodka, a cheese-dusted nest of Piemontese tajarin in a rich onion broth, and tagliatelle in a butter-and-parmesan sauce that Templeton describes as “liquid gold”. But there is also a saffron risotto and not one but two styles of cotolette. Known internationally as a “milanese”, this is the Lombard take on Austrian schnitzel. (Or possibly vice versa: according to Hassan, “the legend says that it was a Milanese chef that [first] made cotoletta for the Austrian royal family.”) The “elephant’s ear” veal schnitzel is a beast, meant for sharing between at least two.
As at Lupa, simplicity is key: these are classic dishes, obsessively refined. (“I still think about my carbonara every day,” Hassan says.) But Ornella represents a slight elevation, at least when it comes to the atmosphere.
The waiting staff buzz around the intimate, wood-panelled salon in natty Service Works jackets. The wine list is a little longer, and the larger kitchen means a more expansive menu. It feels like a special-occasion spot. “We hope that it’ll be somewhere that people make the journey for,” says Templeton.
But he adds that Ornella, like Lupa, needs its crowd of local regulars; the aspiration is to make a genuine neighbourhood restaurant. And what a neighbourhood it is. London Fields is sprouting endless new places to eat at the moment, and Sally Abé just opened Teal across the street.
Hassan spent a year as head chef of Pidgin, on the site where Teal now stands. During that time he made friends with Fran D’Agostino, the owner of Wilton Way Deli. Ornella takes over its corner spot from Fran’s, a casual cafe run by D’Agostino. Luckily, D’Agostino has given her blessing. “She was one of the first people to book,” says Ed. “I think we had to unbook her because we weren’t ready in time.”
Ornella
51 Wilton Way, E8 1BG
Hours:
Tue to Fri 5.30pm–11pm
Sat midday–4pm; 5.30pm–11pm
Sun midday–9pm
