Restaurant of the Month: Bottega 35.
Bottega 35 has done something a lot of restaurants attempt and very few pull off: it looks like Tuscany without once tipping into theme-park territory. No fake vineyard murals, no accordion music lurking in the corners, just warm light, good bones, and the sort of room that makes you sit up slightly straighter the moment you're shown to a table. Credit where it's due, whoever did the fit-out understood restraint.
Service started slowly, slow enough that we clocked it, though it found its feet soon after and stayed found for the rest of the evening. Worth knowing before you go in with a reservation either side of something time-sensitive, but not worth losing sleep over.
To start: Nocellara olives, fresh, plump, juicy, with precisely the right amount of brininess and not a gram more, which is rarer than it should be. Padron peppers arrived blistered and happy under a snowfall of pecorino romano that, if we're honest, they didn't need. These are confident little peppers. They'd have been just as good left to speak for themselves. The aubergine confit, meanwhile, was the dictionary definition of fine: pretty on the plate, perfectly pleasant.
The octopus carpaccio is where things properly woke up: shaved thin, dressed in a citrus emulsion sharp enough to do its job, scattered with pickled onion and pistachio. Genuinely well executed, the kind of starter that quietly outperforms its billing.
Then the crab paccheri turned up and started a small argument at the table over who got the last piece. Al dente pasta, a sauce that tasted properly of the sea rather than just gesturing at it, chilli and lemon oils doing exactly what they're meant to. Moreish in the way that makes you order bread specifically to chase the sauce around the bowl, which, happily, there was: a warm white and seeded baguette with parmesan butter soft enough to spread with a look.
The mafaldine truffle is the dish with the best manners and the best manners, in this case, means arriving via a wheel of parmesan and pecorino, tossed tableside with real theatre, the kind of small performance that makes what should be a standard dinner feel like an occasion. The pasta underneath earned the fuss.
And then, the côte de boeuf. Bone-in, dry-aged, char-grilled, served pink exactly where pink was promised, and genuinely one of the best versions of this dish either of us has had anywhere, not just lately, generally. Ten out of ten isn't a score we hand out often. This earned it without any help from us.
Charred tenderstem with olive oil and almond flakes did its job quietly alongside - the sensible friend at the party who makes sure everyone eats a vegetable.
Dessert split the room. The pistachio cheesecake was dense enough to count as a small commitment, perfectly nice, albeit, the kind of pudding you'd take or leave without much of a fight either way. The tiramisu, on the other hand, is assembled right at the table, which is the second bit of proper theatre of the evening and does a lot to send you out of the door happy.
One reservation: service needs a few minutes to warm up, give it room rather than panicking early.
Would we go back? Yes, specifically for the côte de boeuf and the mafaldine truffle, and we'd happily let the padron peppers sit this one out.
Worth repeating: …that côte de boeuf, arriving already carved, pink all the way through, not a single slice overdone.
Reservations: https://bottega35.com/