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Description: Eco is the sister restaurant of Eco in Clapham, with striking stained glass windows and friendly staff. Eco serves inexpensive delicious Italian food, including pizzas.
Phone: 020 8747 4822
Website: http://www.ecorestaurants.com/
Get in line: the tables at Eco are arranged along one wall
Nearly all the restaurants one goes to repeatedly exist way below the radar of most reviewers. For one thing, if they’re functioning well there doesn’t seem a whole lot to say about them. The local pizzeria ... So what? Well, a lot of what, actually, if this is where most of your eating out happens.
It must be admitted that pizzas don’t require very complicated or varied preparation, which means the reliable chains — Pizza Express, Strada — all do them more or less adequately most of the time. And, on the other hand, there’s only ever a limited amount of extra refinement possible with a pizza. (It’s interesting to look back at Elizabeth David’s rather leery description of a Napoletana in Italian Cooking in 1954, addressed to readers who might never have met one, in which she warns them that it’s “robust food — to go with a corresponding appetite and plenty of rough red wine”.)
Yet in some ways the more basic a food is the more difference that extra care makes. Eco, created by Sami Wasif, has been aiming to deliver the best possible pizzas since launching in Clapham in 1993 and has recently branched out to Chiswick High Road (where Sami’s son Ahmos is head chef).
“We’re passionate about our dough,” they say, explaining their “philosophy”. They use a naturally fermented sourdough, with no raising agent, and it makes their bases that little bit different in taste and texture, certainly more flavoursome, and maybe more digestible than proper sourdough tends to be.
This bit of Chiswick is now stuffed with premium chains — Fishworks, Gourmet Burgers, all that — and on a recent Friday night Eco was far from as full as it deserved, for the quality of what was on the plate, for the price.
The room feels quite hard, with one long, curvy, plywood bench seat, not especially comfortable, running the entire length of one wall. Despite some thuddy music (Moby and the like), it doesn’t create the convivial vibe of more casually scattered tables.
There are 22 different pizzas listed, as well as some pastas. A simple basilico di bufala (£7.95) was great, the cool, top-quality mozzarella making a refreshing contrast to the tomato base, with nice basil and olive oil mixed in. The most expensive pizza, a marinara at £9.90, was also delicious and extraordinarily good value, if a little contrary to the idea of keeping pizzas simple, coming as it did topped with an amazingly generous cocktail of king prawn, cuttlefish, mussels, squid, monkfish, swordfish, white wine, mozzarella, lobster bisque sauce and fresh herbs, all tasting remarkably fresh and, equally remarkably, none of it overcooked.
It’s unnecessary, even a mistake, to order anything else, except perhaps some decent olives (£1.90) to nibble while you wait for the pizzas, though there is a good list of simple starters and even three desserts.
Factor in a bottle of strong Spanish red, say (a Toro at £13.50), and here’s a truly good meal under £40 for two (and until the end of August, they are running a 20 per cent off the final bill special offer).
To have such a great independent place in the neighbourhood is a boon. Whether it’s worth travelling far for is another matter.
The bottom line in Italian restaurants remains Strada, which is currently offering a lunchtime deal of a selected main dish plus a glass of house wine for £7.50 or £8.50 depending upon location. Tried in High Street Kensington, the Pizza Bianca option — white pizza with mozzarella, pancetta, onion and rosemary, finished with baby spinach — was not terrible but still a bit penitential, the base itself not a patch on an Eco pizza. Nobody but a starving man would ever have finished the dry and unadorned crusts left littering the plate.
Interestingly, Eco’s prices slightly but precisely undercut those of Strada on almost every comparison. Parma ham pizza is £9.25, versus £9.95, griddled king prawns £6.90 versus £7.25, pannacotta £4.25 versus £4.75 ... Perhaps it’s no coincidence. There is no comparison, however, between the soulless product of a large, long-established chain and the integrity of a family-run place like this, evident in every mouthful.
It’s pizza as good as London has to offer. For the record, the pizza I’ve most enjoyed came in squidgy squares, topped simply with waxy potatoes, rosemary and olive oil, that I used to buy from street outlets in Naples to eat on the run. But that was in another country...
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
End of the summer holidays - mother up from the coast - kids not looking forward to school. What had better than a restaurant lunch in the beautiful area in Chiswick high road? So off to The Rock we went to Eco (a fantastic and reliable restaurant - good value food, piled high and of great quality).
- Joe, London
Fantastic place. Hard to find a better food taste, quality and generous and warm hosting staff.
- Basel, london
It's not hard to see why ECO is that good; the dazzling dishes that the chef continues to conjure are by now the stuff of a legend. ECO has built its reputation on its astonishing inventions, on pioneering techniques that yield results on the table that surprise, provoke, engage your sense of humour and taste divine. It's a cuisine that differs from others, according to that "it demands psychological reflection". In other words, you don't come to ECO for a feed, you come for an experience.
- Joseph, London
