Grandmothers are among the characters that we most predicably, nostalgically and frequently evoke in the kitchen. For many chefs, there is a direct correlation between their passion for food and the meals these figures stuffed them with during childhood – but It’s not often the influence of that earlier generation is felt quite as palpably as at Polentina.
Canadian-born chef Sophia Massarella’s own grandparents come from Austria and Germany on one side and Italy on the other. It’s remarkable how few objects are needed to evoke their presence here; old-world rattan chairs, a chintzy crockery set that’s used for service and shelves adorned with painted carafes, marionettes and a green felt Alpine hunting hat. That this room manages to have such a vintage, domestic feel is even more surprising given the fact that it is a diminutive canteen sitting at the glass-fronted corner of a working garment factory in the depths of Bow.
An industrial estate in Tower Hamlets isn’t exactly the sort of place you just stumble across for an impromptu dinner, so it’s a credit to Massarella’s intentional, pointed approach to cooking that her 20 covers are regularly booked out – and thanks to word of mouth alone. ‘We do get walk-ins sometimes but it’s tricky,’ says Massarella, after we buzz ourselves upstairs in the factory (her partner’s business, it turns out) and take a seat.
There’s a Ligurian slant to proceedings when we visit – farabalà ravioli, stuffed generously with mortadella and chard and covered in juicy morsels of rabbit meat, and a burrida fish stew sitting on a crostino drenched in its rich sauce – but the menu doesn’t fixate on any geographical area for too long, instead changing every two to three weeks. Many restaurants in London have embraced the wonders of regional Italian cuisine, deciding to emulate a Tuscan trattoria or a Venetian cicheti bar, but Massarella’s nomadic approach manages to stand out while losing none of the specificity. Though she started out cooking the dishes she remembered from her family in Lazio, not far from Rome, her repertoire soon expanded beyond her own grandmother’s to represent the food that nonnas would have been making all over the country. ‘I started doing research, looking at old Italian cookbooks for dishes that are not usually found,’ she explains. ‘They’d mostly be cooked by your grandma, not at a restaurant. It’s to do with prep: once you have to make it to scale, it ends up tasting different.’ Lucky, then, that the dining room here should be quite so small.
This methodical approach to preserving recipes from the past is something of a hangover from Massarella’s previous life as a photographer. For past projects such as her pictures of citrus growers across Italy, she became almost an archivist and documentarian. ‘That same spirit went into this,’ she explains. ‘In so many places, when I was doing the project, I realised that kids didn’t want to take on their grandparent’s trade – so these old men in their 80s had no one to pass their expertise down to. That also translates to food.’
All of this means that the version of Italian she cooks is far from the sunny, tomato-slathered standard of the common imagination; the recipes she picks are much more rare and unexpected. They frequently feature the beige comfort of things in broth (one of Massarella’s soft spots), the joy of stuffed things and plenty of offal. The clear standout on tonight’s menu is carciofi ripieni di coratella (artichokes filled with entrails and barley) – at once deliciously mushy and pungent. ‘St John became the champion of the English cooking this sort of thing, but many people don’t understand the Italian side of it. They wouldn’t put Italian and offal in the same category.’ she continues. Yet the thriftier side of Italian cuisine definitely dabbles in this realm and Massarella has the deft touch to stay true to its humble cosiness while landing on something precise, delicious and clean. It inevitably reminds me of my own grandmother – in a matter-of-fact rather than rose-tinted way – so it’s not long until Massarella and I start trading recollections and book recommendations. I tell her of my grandma’s carne all’albese, and her ravioli al plin: I never learned how to make them and regret that bitterly. But with any luck, thanks to people like Massarella running restaurants like Polentina, these recipes might live on through plenty more menus after all.
