Lots of restaurants are beautiful. Lots of them perform the strange, mysterious conjuring trick of turning what is essentially an oblong of brickwork into a richly-detailed aesthetic fantasy. But I really feel that we may need a whole new descriptive lexicon to do justice to the way that Leo’s, a new Italian bar and restaurant on Chatsworth Road in Clapton, carefully evokes a specific time, place and mood.
Beyond the weather-beaten mosaic of its tiled exterior and ersatz Fifties sign, there is a portal to a romanticised past; a sustained act of Italian make-believe etched in wood-panelling, tubular steel modernist furnishings, framed vintage adverts, newspapers clipped to a rail, and the sweet-edged nimbus of wood smoke that scents the main dining room.
