Picture perfect: Locatelli at the National Gallery reviewed

Spectator

16-07-2025

I feel for Locatelli, the new Italian restaurant inside the National Gallery, whose opening coincides with the 200th anniversary of the gallery and a rehang which I can't see the point of because I want to watch Van Eyck in the dark. Locatelli must compete with the Caravaggio chicken, which is really called 'Supper at Emmaus' if you are an art historian or an adult. In the publicity photographs the chef Giorgio Locatelli is actually standing in front of the Caravaggio chicken. It looks as if Jesus is waving at Giorgio Locatelli but the chicken is unmoved. It stole all the gravitas. 'Locatelli is the National Gallery's new Italian master with the latest chapter of his beloved London restaurant,' said Wallpaper* magazine idiotically: Wallpaper*, of all magazines, should know better than to compare Bacchus and Ariadne with ravioli.
Locatelli hangs in a mezzanine in the Sainsbury Wing, which is all mezzanine and one gilded staircase to heaven. It is fiercely generic in creams, beiges and golds and though I understand why they did it – they did it because it will remind the sorts of people who can afford to eat at Locatelli of their own houses in west London – I wish they hadn't. I know the British don't really do the visual arts, except motorcars. We have one perfect painter, J.M.W. Turner (working-class, of course), plus Frank Auerbach (a German-Jewish refugee who painted anguish), so the best of it is seascapes and screaming.
Locatelli sprouts from another hinterland: poised and avoidant anti-art, a place without conflict or regret. It's a rental flat in W1, a neutral cashmere cardigan, the VIP area at Glastonbury and – and this is what is unforgivable – it is inches from the Renaissance. What's left of it, which isn't much, to be fair. Beige moleskin banquettes do not belong near Velázquez's 'Rokeby Venus', which a suffragette attacked in 1914, possibly because Venus is showing so much arse. (I feel the same way about MTV.) If you want to eat in a mock-up of Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' or the 'Arnolfini Marriage' – and I do very much, I love a themed restaurant if the theme is more than nothingness and ease – Locatelli is not for you.
It is, rather, for those who seek immaculate Italian cuisine. We eat a salad of Parma ham, pear and aged balsamic; burrata with spring vegetable and mint salad; veal tortelloni with gremolada and parmesan sauce; tagliatelle with beef and pork ragout; an immense rib-eye steak; a chocolate cake; a tiramisu. It is all sinuous and beautiful: Italian, not Flemish art then, and I prefer the Flemish school.
I understand why the National Gallery wants a real restaurant, as the Royal Academy has. (José Pizarro at the RA is exquisite, as no one has ever said about the Summer Exhibition, which seems to be painted by people who have been on Jim'll Fix It.) They want to remake it as another polished lifestyle destination: that is the rehang. Yet there is something savage about the National Gallery, and not just because it is built on the site of the former royal stables so, were you a medium or Hilary Mantel, you would hear ghostly neighs as white Jesuses wave at you. Look around: where you find civilisation, barbarism will be close at hand. Art should not make you hungry: it should drive you mad. In 1987, a man shot Leonardo's Burlington House Cartoon of the Virgin and friends. I take a bite of impeccable tiramisu, and I understand.