Savile Row’s Sartoria

What better name than Sartoria – a word that means ‘tailoring’ – for a plush restaurant on Savile Row?

Rex Harrison’s trouser pattern cuttings are on the walls; carpets sweep the floors, the windows drape down to the ground – it’s almost like a suit showroom. In fact it is: the place is speckled with elegant men – and it is mainly men – in sharp-cut tailoring with collars like blades.

Sartoria, the Italian restaurant in dandy Mayfair, will start offering pasta-making classes to the public in September and I was there to have a go.

All of Sartoria’s pasta is made onsite and executive chef Lukas Pfaff showed us two of his signature pastas: spaghetti and casareccie. Once we’d slid past the horizontally-sliced pig – a shock for the vegetarian among us – we got to the elegant pasta machine in the kitchen. It uses bronze dials, says Pfaff, to ensure a rough, serrated texture which holds the sauce.

Most real Italian pasta is just flour and water, without the egg, he tells us so we sift flour and water into the machinery and watch it extrude through wonderful holes in the dial. They look like scruffy white hairs growing towards you.

Once they’re at the desired length, you hack the strands with a blade implement, taking care not to drop it on your feet as I nearly did. Curl the strands around your hands into a nest and store. We also used Italian free range eggs to make the casareccie which gives it a dishy golden glow.

Then Pfaff shows us two beautifully simple sauces – a basil and parsley pesto and a spicy tomato sauce. And the tomato pasta is very good (as is the other but this was my favourite). What is noticeable is that this hand-made, extruded pasta is so easy to hook onto your fork – none of that oily sliding and slurping as with shop-bought pastas. The rough, dry texture makes it easy to handle.

Sartoria’s other food is generally light, simple and inoffensive. I went another day to try a la carte. The carpaccio anti-pasti I chose was one of Lukas’ signature dishes, the carpaccio being ‘battuta Fassone’ beef with aged parmesan and rocket. The colours were almost primary; yellow cheese, blood red beef and green flashes of rocket. The beef was soft but its flavour was unfortunately swamped by the, admittedly good, parmesan. I moved on to a small plin ravioli, which I believe means it comes from Piedmonte in Italy, with sheep’s ricotta, spinach, walnuts and sage. These were little nuggets swathed in oil with a gentle ricotta in a friendly tussle with the walnut crunches.

Then came mains, for me, roast monkfish with tropea – a kind of onion – purée with crispy parma ham. I would have been happier if the fish was a bit less cooked. The parma ham was salutary and the best bit, its saltiness, nicely undercut by the marmaladey onion. I finished with a pleasant Sicilia ice parfait with passion fruit, not too cold, not too sweet, a hybrid block of nougat and icecream.

And then it was out onto the street to watch the tailors snipping for mens’ legs from their basements. What could be more fitting?

Sartoria Bar Ristorante
20 Savile Row
Mayfair
W1S 3PR