Food that's both serious and serene: Babbo reviewed

Spectator

21-05-2025

After a week in which Israel triumphed at the Eurovision Song Contest with second place – western Europe is for them, eastern Europe slightly less so (plus ça change) – I review Babbo, the new neighbourhood restaurant in St John's Wood. Restaurants tend to drift in, settle and drift onwards here. The Victorians knew it as a land of mistresses and smut; now it is a world of private hospitals, bad parking and MCC members, who seem bewildered by it all, as if Lord's landed like a spaceship in an alien land. Only Oslo Court seems impregnable, because it manifests Jewish solidity – it is disguised as the home of your cousin in a mansion flat – and Jewish subversion. It is a specialist in seafood and cream cakes. Everything else comes and goes.
In a high street dedicated to underwear, estate agents and aesthetic medicine, it is pleasing to find something as useful as an Italian restaurant. There is an Ivy, of course, but it is generic – it reminds me of Sleeping Beauty's castle without the magic or ambition – and a Gail's. Idiots hate Gail's because they think it is an augur of gentrification. They might as well count blades of grass as perform their stupid activism here. They are a century too late.
Babbo is double-fronted, and it speaks to St John's Wood's myths: it means Daddy. A Daddy who double parks and buys underwear. It used to be Harry Morgan's deli (born 1948), a cheesecake and salt beef bar so beloved that one reviewer said Babbo was dancing on his grandparents' graves.