It's possible to feel ambivalent about restaurants that cook the same kind of food that you cook yourself. On the one hand, you obviously like that kind of food – if you didn't (durr), you wouldn't cook it. On the other hand, one reason people eat out is because they fancy a change. Restaurants should resemble a mild, benign form of adultery, in which you cheat on your own cooking. If it's the same food you cook yourself, then it's less of a thrill.
Zucca is a shiny new restaurant, all glass to the street and open-plan to the kitchen, in a part of London where I hadn't been for 20 years, Bermondsey. Back then, you'd mainly go to Bermondsey if you felt like getting stabbed. Now you go there for trendy boutiques, design consultancies and just-so new gastropubs. At least, that's what you do until the recession gets worse.
The food at Zucca is seasonal, Italian-influenced, and concentrates on delivering the maximum amount of flavour with the minimum of fuss. I'm not claiming that's how I cook, but it is how I try to cook. Looking at the menu, I reckon I have at one time or other cooked just about everything on it. So there is no thrill of strangeness at tucking in here – but that's about my only complaint. One of the best things about Zucca is that it delivers River Cafe-influenced cooking at noticeably reasonable prices. Two three-course meals with wine, water and coffee came in at less than £80. That helps a restaurant's atmosphere, because it means that a higher proportion of customers are spending their own money.
The only thing I didn't like was the only thing on the menu I'd never cook: a starter of sliced duck breast with beetroot, ordered because it rather stood out as being more St John-like than River Cafe-like in inspiration. The trouble with it was not just edible but visible: whacking great grains of salt chucked on at the last moment. If you can see the salt, there's usually a problem. Here, that last gratuitous spray of sodium chloride threw out the balance of the dish, since the duck had in any case been seasoned – the salt was the only thing you could taste.
Apart from that, it was winners all the way. It's hard to make exceptional pasta – it's by definition hard to make exceptional comfort food – but Zucca does, in this instance with a dish of rigatoni, courgettes and pecorino. The flavour-texture contrast of melted cheese, soft vegetable and pasta, firm but not tooth-bustingly al dente, showed real skill. It wasn't on my plate, unfortunately, and I came close to shouting, "Behind you!" and scoffing the contents of my co-diner's dish.
Both main courses were excellent, too. Braised rabbit leg with polenta came with a nicely non-reduced, satisfying stock-based sauce. The temptation is to spike the sauce with a reduction and make it more like a posh French restaurant dish than a homely Italian one, yet Zucca passed that test. Plain grilled swordfish with rocket salad and panzanella, the Italian bread sort-of-salad, was the kind of dish that offers the cook nowhere to hide, and lots of ways to go wrong. It was perfect, and I say that as someone who likes panzanella in theory but often finds it soggy or sharp or tired-seeming.
Puds: vanilla panacotta, right on the edge of being set – ie, perfect, since if it's too set it feels lumpy, and also lets you know the cook has cheated by playing safe with tons of gelatine. Lemon tart, plainly made fresh about an hour before, was exemplary. The wine list is good value. In fact, I'd put it a bit more strongly than that and say the well-sourced, well-priced wine list is a good reason to go to Zucca in itself.
As for the service, well, at one point I was looking around for a waiter and couldn't catch anyone's eye. The chef in the open-plan kitchen saw me and hailed one on my behalf. That might sound unexceptional, but I've never had a chef do that before. As people in the restaurant business should always bear in mind, we customers tend to remember the small extra things that make us feel the love. If I lived nearby, I would more or less move into Zucca.