Popolo | Buzzy Italian Dining in Shoreditch
If you’re ever wandering around looking stressed or upset in Italy, you’ll probably find a kindly old nonna patting you on the shoulder and telling you ‘tutto finisce a tarallucci e vino’, which translates as ‘everything ends with biscuits and wine’, and essentially means that everything is going to be ok.
It’s also, coincidentally, true of the menu at Rivington Street’s Italian restaurant Popolo.
This co-venture from chef Jon Lawson (formerly of Theo Randall’s eponymous restaurant) and restaurant manager Munur Shah brings relaxed Italian tapas-style dining to Shoreditch. It’s housed in a fairly innocuous building by Old Street, where you’ll just catch sight of the buzzy dining bar wrapped around the open kitchen, with clusters of guests huddled around mouthwatering plates of Michelin Bib Gourmand-garlanded food.
Popolo’s tapas-style menu is, of course, the best dining set-up, because you get to try all things – including:
MEAT, like grouse cappelletti, freshly handmade pasta parcels filled with Scottish grouse and porcini butter; and pan-roasted quail with smoky aubergine and grilled radicchio;
FISH, from octopus with paprika and seaweed to sustainably sourced diver-caught scallops with saltwort, capers and lentils; and
VEG, along the lines of red wine and chestnut risotto, or these deep fried olives with labneh.
And if you still have room after accidentally ordering everything on the menu, there’s an extremely tasty-sounding burnt honey panna cotta with your name on it. As well as, strangely enough, a glass of low-intervention dessert wine and twice-baked Marcona almond biscuits.
See? Told you it would all be ok.
NOTE: Popolo is open for dinner Mon-Sat, 6-11pm. You can book a table, and find out more, HERE.
Popolo | 26 Rivington Street, EC2A 3DU
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