Casa Batavia is easy to recommend
By Alex Larman, published on 12 September 2011
Italian restaurants in London fall, broadly, into two categories. The first one is what we could call ‘ersatz Italian’, where it’s either part of a pizza and pasta-focused chain, or where the decor is all cheesy tourist-chintz, decorated with endless pictures of the Tower of Pisa and the Coliseum. The cuisine in these places is not, to put it mildly, of a high standard. Then there’s the other extreme, your River Cafes and Theo Randalls and Locanda Locatellis, which are very, very good indeed, drip with awards and accolades, and cost about as much as a second-hand car for a reasonable meal for two with some decent wine. Most people would wish to avoid either eventuality.
Then there’s the third category, of restaurants that are operated as authentic, unpretentious neighbourhood establishments, where you can be sure of a warm welcome, decent food and wine, and an enjoyable experience that will stay with you long after you leave. This is certainly the case for Notting Hill’s Casa Batavia, a place that doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel but nevertheless offers a decent standard of Italian cuisine that makes for an extremely pleasant evening.
We visited on a wet and miserable Wednesday and were very much in need of succour, which the restaurant duly provided. A couple of restorative glasses of Prosecco were soon accompanied in short order by some of the house specialty of cicchetti. Unfortunately the award-winning dish of Piedmont cheese was off, so we consoled ourselves with impressively spicy salami and oregano and ricotta cheese. These are deceptively large, and practically function as starters in their own right.
Main courses of tagliata of beef and lamb were both impeccably cooked and presented, summoning up all the authentic feel of an Italian taverna with economy and style. They were washed down with an excellent bottleof Cabernet Sauvignon that gave the tenderly cooked meat an extra zing, and made for a splendid repast. Desserts lived up to the same high standards; a suitably decadent chocolate pudding had a real cocoa-flavoured kick to it, and a simpler confection of melon and strawberry seemed far more suited to a proper Italian summer rather than the usual travesty for it that an August London offers.
Casa Batavia is a really welcome addition to the pantheon of local West London restaurants, and, judging by the Italian-heavy nature of many of the visitors when we went there, about as authentic as you’re likely to get. A visit there is easy to recommend.
Casa Batavia, 135 Kensington Church Street, London W8, Tel: +44 20 7221 7348
Casa Batavia is easy to recommend
Casa Batavia is a really welcome addition to the pantheon of local West London restaurants, and, judging by the Italian-heavy nature of many of the visitors when we went there, about as authentic as you’re likely to get. A visit there is easy to recommend.
