King's Cross, Italian Restaurant Guide

“A nice pit-stop for pasta lovers” – this expanding chain is now up to its fifth restaurant spin-off from the original Soho deli (with the June 2023 opening of a new 80-seater, overlooking Clapham Common), and fans say it provides an “attractive”, “buzzing” setting for “simple dishes, well cooked”. A meal is “unlikely to live long in the memory though”, and there’s a growing fear that “as they have expanded the quality has dropped”. Top Tip – at the W1 original (est. 1944 originally as a deli) “sitting upstairs or by the bar is lovely, the windowless basement is not particularly comfortable”.

One minute’s walk from Google HQ, amidst the clean-lined new canyons north of King’s Cross, this is the year-old London outpost of Brighton & Hove’s well-regarded chain (whose unit in Shoreditch’s Boxpark is no longer in operation). Reports on the Brighton operations are all very upbeat, but this one has yet to spark much in the way of interest.