La Campagna - Warminster

The dining room was light, airy and noticeably clean. It was also thankfully devoid of Italian flags, Gondolas and Scooters, as a matter of fact there was literally nothing in the room at all bearing even the most distant and tenuous connection to Italy – I may well have been the most Italian thing there. It was warm, comfortable and exquisitely characterless.

Prior to the evening I had asked the Chinese to have a think about her expectations (she has a passion for Italy and has travelled it extensively), she hoped for nothing more than good food, good wine and a mildly Italian experience just outside Warminster – one that briefly revives memories of the Basilica in Padua or strolling the Appian Way, and of course, sunshine. La Campagna’s online reviews read well with good food, great service and magnificent portions being the general consensus.

The menu was true to form, all the standard generic stuff that non-Italians think actual Italians eat when they go out – which they don’t, unless they’re here on holiday and already bored with fish and chips, hipster burgers and gastro-pubs. My first instinct, always, is to look for the Carbonara – apart from being one of my favourite pasta dishes, it’s also an accurate and effective way of gauging the ‘Italian-ness’ of the place.

It’s spectacularly easy to make and even easier to mess up, it must have the correct ingredients – with a couple of only-just acceptable exceptions, and shouldn’t arrive resembling spaghetti with bacon and scrambled eggs. Nor should the spaghetti resemble fettuccine, which counts as a non-acceptable exception. Cream is also a big no-no as are such mysterious things as Italian smoked bacon – what is that?

So, with all of that in mind, I went for Spaghetti al Pomodoro as a back-to-basics starter, my influence from the East chose Breaded Calamari and fancied nothing more than a Pizza for mains, while I opted for Involtini di Maiale – stuffed pork loin wrapped in pancetta. The calamari were exactly the same as you find everywhere else, depressingly limp and wholesale.

The spaghetti dish should be aptly re-named ’Spaghetti Affogato’, it was literally drowning in a tomato coloured soup that lacked everything except vague tomatoes, most notably, the as-promised fresh basil. When I requested some bread in order to soak up the red sea of sauce to enable me to find the pasta lurking in the pomodoran depths, I discovered that it’s only available as a starter. So I ordered another starter – the bread starter, which arrived moments later, sliced of course and accompanied by the obligatory and soul destroying pot of balsamic vinegar drowned in olive(ish) oil. The spaghetti was perfectly cooked, so lost in sugo that I couldn’t taste it, but perfectly cooked nonetheless and made for a nice follow-up starter after the basil-less tomato-ish bread soup.

The pork and the pizza arrived. True to form, the mash that partnered the pig was of Alpine proportions and it’s side-kick of braised curly cabbage was conspicuous by it’s very anonymity – you knew it was there once it was in your mouth. The pork was genuinely juicy, tasty and beautifully cooked. The stuffing of herbs and pine nuts made themselves apparent, but the pancetta wrapping wasn’t quite crispy enough to convince me that the whole thing didn’t have a slight hint of ‘left-over from lunchtime’ about it.

It was however, a perfectly acceptable plate of very tasty food which more than made up for any soggy pancetta issues, volumetrically. There was no room left for dessert after wiping that plate clean with the remnants of my second of three improvised starters.

The Quattro Stagione pizza offered up to the Oriental was okay I suppose, it came with five seasons rather than four, so some added value there. What can you say about pub pizza other than save yourself a fiver and go to Gino’s for a real one? Or two on a Tuesday! We were both slowly slipping into a carb-based food-coma and our final lunge for the finishing line failed as we succumbed to the tsunami of food that is La Campagna. We were full.

The reviews applauding the service are justified and well deserved. Attentive at all times without being persistent, always there when the glasses were empty and a finely tuned instinct for choosing just the right moment to clear plates and re-load. Five stars for sure. Our server’s softly spoken accent provoked us to enquire if she was Italian. No, Polish. And the chef? He’s polish too.

I later did a little snooping around online and discovered the founder of La Campagna to be Albanian, which is kind of perfect. Albania’s food culture is very similar to Italy’s, there’s the Mediterranean diet of course with fresh fish, locally sourced meats and seasonal vegetables at it’s core. Albania’s cuisine is also very regional with distinct differences in styles of cookery across the country. All done slightly differently of course and I’d love to sample it, but there’s definitely a tenuous connection and cultural similarity.