A Win win situation: The restaurant has re-emerged in Camberwell after closing in Peckham
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Lots of newly-opened restaurants can take a good few weeks to warm up. Others still need a heavily tweaked menu and a hard reboot to land on a formula that actually works. We all know this. Even so, one of the weirder constants of this job is that it often feels like I am passing judgement on something in its nascent, unfinished state; that I am, in essence, gracelessly digging a fork into an elaborate, multi-tiered cake still in the process of being piped with icing.
But then, every now and again, there are places like the new Forza Win: a fresh pasta spot in Camberwell that, on a recent evening a mere fortnight into its existence, already had the warmth, confidence and fully-realised, clattering soulfulness of a restaurant that had been there for decades. Gales of laughter were bouncing off the walls; young parents were pouring wine and pacifying wriggling toddlers with iPhone episodes of Bluey; and then, all of a sudden, servers and chefs emerged from the open kitchen, bearing a candle-adorned tiramisu, and leading the sort of crazed mass rendition of Happy Birthday you don’t hear that much any more. “This is giving me real old-school Italian restaurant flashbacks,” said my wife Madeleine, herself a veteran of youthful waitressing stints in noisy, small-town trattorias. It was an astute observation.
