William Sitwell reviews Tropea, Birmingham: ‘A fun Italian, jollied along by friendly staff'

Telegraph

24-04-2025

The soundtrack of Tropea is 1980s. Which would be great if I was doing an edit of the music of my teens as it would mean the absence of atrocities such as Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
But I was diner, not DJ, so that musical aberration was chuntering out as we pondered the menu and I had to relive the trauma of being shoved on to a dance floor when I didn't want to dance with anybody and especially not to that song.
Such was the start of dinner in this Italian place in the Harborne district of Birmingham, whose name is that of a town set into the dramatic cliffs of Calabria.
The décor instead harks to the semi-industrial: open ceiling, metal beams. And then softer woods and muted colours with art propped up on shelves – graphic works, a few old ads for Italian airlines and the like. The lighting was set at 'Sitwell'; the perfect ambient point, giving warmth and yet enough glow to see the menu, food and one's companion.
There's a bar right at the entrance, my kind of entreaty, and it's a place jollied along by extremely friendly staff.
The menu is a traditional Italian mix of antipasti, pasta, meat, fish and veg, though a modernised, pared-down version with the staff encouraging the sharing of dishes.
We started with burrata, a dish centred on that soft and creamy singular roundel of cheese, which came on rocket leaves with slices of blood orange. That worked well but they'd also lobbed on candied walnuts as well as a large, circular drizzle of basil oil and lots of flecks of Maldon salt. I understand the thinking – the tangy orange and peppery leaves tempering the burrata, both balanced by sugary nuts, whose sweet crunch is calmed by the oil then piqued by salt – but it suggested the chef was like a conjurer who can't figure out when to end the trick.
And I say we started with the burrata, but only just. There was an assault from the kitchen: sea bream crudo, beef carpaccio, venison ragù and prawn linguine all arriving like the metaphorical bus, some sort of gag from the guy at the depot shouting, 'Go, go, go!', causing a pile-up further down the route.
'Whoah!' I exclaimed to a waitress. Although I said it in English, not horse. And things calmed. And mercifully the rocket that was on far too many dishes stopped coming as well.
The sea bream was soft and lovely with a nice acidic crunch from tiny cubes of apple. And the pastas were decent, proper al dente tagliatelle with the venison ragù, likewise the linguine, though the 'wild red prawns', which presumably lent the starter size its £14 price tag, were without any remarkable discernment of high-quality prawniness.
There was a splendid dish of octopus, lying charred and lush and tasty on a bed laden with goodies: smooth cauliflower, slices of olive, capers, onions, drizzles of salsa verde. But lamb livers were a let-down, too much grey, not enough pink.
We had broccoli too, which showed they had my memo on the lighting but not this dish, showered as it was with – nay cowering under – a pile of almonds.
Ordering the dessert of dark chocolate sorbet was really my own foolishness, but I just wanted to see if it's actually possible to have such a thing: rich and dark and not watery. Alas, this version showed me it's still not.
Tropea is cheerful, upbeat fun and, I suspect, on its best days, a prized asset to the neighbourhood.