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Benoli, Norwich: ‘If this place was closer to my house, I would eat here a lot’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
‘Few things give me greater pleasure than wandering out of a hotel on the hunt for dinner, expecting nothing and finding a local gem’
While eating a bowl of fresh pumpkin cappellacci at Benoli in Norwich, I realised it had been about 10 years since I’d last travelled this way in search of food. That is shameful on my part, because good things are happening in this nook of East Anglia. The Assembly House, for example, one of the UK’s loveliest boutique hotels, offers a storming afternoon tea, the coffee shops around Elm Hill are fabulous, and restaurants such as Farmyard and Benedicts come highly recommended. In fact, overall, Norwich is a great place for structureless mooching, which is my favourite type of break.
And then there is Benoli, a modern, three-floored Italian hidden up an alley in the city centre. I tried to look up which part of Italy Benoli was in, only to discover that it’s a combination of the names of brothers Ben and Oliver Boon, in the type of mash-up that has warmed my heart ever since my grandma’s neighbours Ron and Valerie went upmarket and named their terrace house Ronderval in the 1970s. Chef Oliver – a MasterChef: The Professionals finalist who has worked for Gordon Ramsay and was head chef at Roux at the Landau in London – recreates memories of childhood trips to Italy and Sicily, and my pumpkin pasta is the star of today’s show. It is all made by hand, rather than by machine, the pasta is soft, firm and lustrous, and the cappellacci come swimming in a rich sea of sage butter with salted ricotta. There’s no skimping on portion sizes – there can never be too much fresh, pumpkin-filled pasta, after all. Or, for that matter, too many top-quality, purple-hued winter tomatoes, cut once and drizzled in brilliant olive oil.
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