Casa Romana in Carlisle is an unreconstructed British-Italian restaurant that celebrated its 30th birthday earlier this month. In times of yore, it was a regular pitstop for my gang before an evening’s shimmying to Jamiroquai at the nearby Pagoda nightclub. We went to Casa Romana for a stomach-lining bowl of carbonara, warm frizzante and a laugh.
This was real Italian food, I thought, until my head was later turned by Anna Del Conte and Rose Gray breathing into my ear that food from Puglia, Florence or Sicily could be delicate and required cogitation, deft seasoning and a fine soffritto base. I learned that lentils, white beans and dressed leaves were authentic, and that salmon fillet in sambuca probably wasn’t. I also learned that expecting an Italian restaurant to serve dough balls was rather gauche, apparently, and that bread in my ribollita was how humble peasants lived and they loved it.
I still love places like Casa Romana regardless. Large, heaving, far from London, with not a whiff of pretension and a “happy hour” from lunch until 6pm every Saturday, when they serve three courses for £16.75. Locanda Locatelli in Marylebone this is not – and thank God, because last time I was there, the bill arrived and I removed my glasses hoping that a smear of linguine all’astice on my bifocals had made the green salad seem to cost £18.50. In these current testing times, even those who are well-versed in Neapolitan techniques or Antonio Carluccio’s tomes are creeping back to brilliant places like Casa Romana: high-street restaurants with wipeable menus, breaded garlic mushrooms, enormous pepper pots and, in some cases, serving staff who, you suspect, are not a fraction as Italian-sounding when they’re talking in the kitchen.
These places are a far cry from the River Cafe, where you sit downwind of the Beckhams and Stanley Tucci, but they will make you a decent mozzarella and ham calzone, and a honeycomb ice-cream bombe for afters. Americans call them “mom and pop restaurants”, which may be a pejorative term to food-scene people, but to me sounds cosy as hell. Yes, Casa Romana is safe, but over the decades it has also moved with its audience, tweaking its menu to provide pizza and pasta for gluten-free and dairy-free types – they’ll do vegans the likes of good, chargrilled melanzane or spaghetti arrabiata with jalapeños.
One of the highlights of the current menu is the understated bruschetta forza, loaded with a mountain of sweet tomato perched on a layer of sun-dried tomato sauce and doused in olive oil. For the anything-goes brigade, meanwhile, there’s budino nero, or fat bullets of breaded Cumbrian black pudding with red onion marmalade and very good honey mustard sauce; and delicious, plump gamberoni cooked in butter, chilli and ’nduja.
Nothing at Casa Romana is dainty or tweezered, but it is enjoyable. Massimo Bottura will never trouble his Osteria Francescana menu with the likes of baked pollo piccante – a large, roaringly red bowl of chicken breast baked in a spicy ragu to be enjoyed by scooping through the mush with garlic bread and pushing it into your face while simultaneously slurping a glass of chianti. But those three-star Michelin places are a lot poorer for this lack of largesse. (Incidentally, Casa Romana’s house red is a drinkable South African shiraz at just over five quid a glass, though I had a Peroni Zero.)
The starters are better than the mains. We shared a pizza pescatore with prawns, mussels and calamari on a garlic butter base, which was adequate, but not particularly memorable. Much better was the pizza bianco with a carbonara sauce base and a generous scattering of chicken, prosciutto and salami. We shared a whiffing, goat’s cheese-laden risotto calabrese with broccoli that, again, wasn’t refined, but was not rejected, either. There is a Cumberland sticky toffee pudding on the dessert menu that is a playful interpretation of the one made in Cartmel. However, the £4.50 dolcetti menu is a positive boon, because it means you can load the table with these “small treats” under the guise that you plan to share them – warm chocolate brownie, a rather good, boozy tiramisu, a riff on Eton mess, say – before making a land grab for the lot.
I recently lusted over Basque cheesecake, and sneered at people who like “normal” cheesecake with its buttery biscuit base and oozing fruit coulis. Basque is where it’s at, I said only two weeks ago, so why did I inhale Casa Romana’s mascarpone and mango cheesecake with its crumbly bottom and sunset-coloured, teeth-chatteringly sugary fruit sauce, served with whipped cream, scraping the bowl like a labrador? It is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, and anyway, Casa Romana does not need my feedback. I hope they change absolutely nothing. They’ve stood upright since 1993. Put me down for a table for two for its 50th.
Casa Romana Italian Kitchen 44 Warwick Road, Carlisle, Cumbria, 01228 591969. Open Mon-Fri, lunch 11.45am-2pm, dinner 5-9pm, Sat 11.45am-9.30pm. About £30 a head à la carte; express lunch/happy hour menu, £12.75 for two courses, £16.75 for three, all plus drinks and service.
