There are two kinds of new Italian restaurant in London. The first arrives shouting about nonnas, tomatoes and passion, then serves you pasta that tastes faintly of compromise. The second just gets on with it. Tortello, opening this January inside the Royal Lancaster London, is very firmly the latter.
You approach it from Lancaster Gate — next to the tube station, on the very stretch where The Italian Job once screeched its way into cinema history — and immediately sense that this is not another anonymous hotel dining room. There is a private street entrance, a reassuring sign. Inside, it feels like a restaurant that expects to be judged on its food, not its press release.
Tortello means a single tortelli, which is either charmingly modest or quietly smug – and, as it turns out, entirely accurate. This is a place obsessed with detail. Pasta is the point. Everything else politely knows its place.
The room is handsome without being theatrical: olive trees lining the walkway, a hand-painted vineyard mural across tiled walls, and a pistachio-green 1960s Fiat 500 parked inside like an Italian joke that actually lands. Beyond the windows, Hyde Park and the Italian Gardens do their thing, lending the whole enterprise a sense of calm inevitability. It feels expensive without being self-conscious about it – a rare trick.
I ate with my friend Tamara, and we started with olives and focaccia. Warm, dimpled, slicked with olive oil. No drama. No gimmicks. Just the reassurance that someone in the kitchen knows exactly what they are doing.
The kitchen, led by Giuseppe, works with the sort of earnest seriousness that pasta deserves. This is handmade stuff: specialist Italian flours, rich golden-yolk eggs laid exclusively for the restaurant, ingredients sourced from people who care deeply and talk slowly about them. Mercifully, none of that earnestness reaches the plate.
My shaved Brussels sprouts salad — with Marcona almonds, chopped egg and citrus vinaigrette — was brisk, fresh and pleasingly unsentimental. Tamara’s seafood calamarata, though, was where Tortello really showed its hand. Perfectly cooked ring-shaped pasta came tangled in a langoustine tomato sauce studded with Scottish clams, Dorset mussels and king prawns. It tasted of the sea, of patience, and of someone resisting the urge to interfere.
This dish sits among a menu that takes regional Italy seriously without becoming reverential: Delica pumpkin tortelli from Veneto with brown butter and balsamic; beef shin and Chianti tortello folded around an eight-hour ragù; rustic pici with mussels, cavolo nero and aglio e olio. These are not reinventions. They are restorations.
For my main, the sea bass was treated with similar restraint — properly cooked, partnered with Scottish clams, sautéed spinach and a silky potato and celeriac mash, the white wine sauce keeping itself firmly in the background. Tamara’s fillet steak did exactly what a fillet steak should do: deep flavour, good cooking, a glossy beef reduction, crisp fries and chilli-and-garlic cavolo nero providing just enough swagger.
We shared dessert – homemade vanilla ice cream with sour cherries and almond brittle – which did not attempt to be clever and was all the better for it.
The drinks list deserves mention, not least for its seriousness about those who aren’t drinking. Alongside Italian wines, spritzes, digestivi and proper espresso, there is a thoughtful selection of mocktails that feel adult rather than apologetic – complex, balanced and clearly conceived with the same care as the food. It is a small detail, but a telling one.
What Tortello manages, impressively, is to open inside a five-star hotel and still feel like a place Londoners will actually return to. It has warmth, confidence and — most importantly — food that does not try to impress you, because it doesn’t need to.
In a city increasingly obsessed with performance, Tortello restores something quietly radical: generosity, clarity and proper cooking. One tortelli at a time.
Lancaster Terrace, London, United Kingdom W2 2TY
020 7101 7640
