Pastaio, restaurant review: London's newest Italian is 'a childish pleasure'

'I crave the same things I wanted when I was eight, a big plate of cheesy pasta'

It's 6pm on a Saturday and I am in a restaurant eating pasta with cheese sauce for dinner. They prefer to call it cacio e pepe these days, but let's not kid ourselves. This is a childish pleasure. Pasta Al-Freudo.

My pal's having rigatoni with tomato sauce, which they at least have the decency to call tomato sauce, even if it is 'slow cooked with marjoram'.

We're in Pastaio, the newish restaurant from Stevie Parle, the latest proprietor to look at the two-hour queue for pasta with cheese sauce at Padella, in Borough Market, and think 'I'll have a bit of that'.

Parle's career so far looks like a process of gradually learning not to overestimate his customers. At The Dock Kitchen he doled out more highfalutin New-Euro dishes under Tom Dixon lights. Then, with Rotorino, Palatino and Sardine, he reined it in a bit, finding a good, loosely regional French & Italian deliveries pitched right in the millennial blockhole.

Now, at last, he's realised what everyone wants is a bowl of pasta for about a tenner. You say childish, I say try a dish.

Pastaio is just off Carnaby St, an area with a tremendous number of shoppers but a mixed bag of restaurants, an absence Dishoom has merrily exploited. It's a light, bright, square room with a large glass front and garish, Insta-friendly art along the back wall.

The starters are simple but trouble has been taken. Chili and oregano lift a buffalo mozzarella. Castelfranco, pomegranate and pecorino is a bittersweet salad that cares what it tastes like. The short list of pastas, worked through on three separate visits, all earn their place, but particularly the cacio e pepe and the agnoli, which are silky little meat grenades, like unfurling dim-sum, brimful of pork and game.

Pastaio looks simple, but it's not. Cacio e pepe, as anyone who's attempted it at home in recent years will attest is much easier to get wrong than right, which is why many Italian restaurants don't bother.

In such a prime spot the margins depend on rapid turnover, and I suspect also on lots of people ordering the prosecco slushy, which instantly tops the charts as London's most basic drink.

You're packed in, sometimes on dreaded communal tables, but you don't mind too much.

It's all characterised by an unexpected generosity of spirit. They text you when the table's ready, rather than making you stand in the Siberian wind. The tomato sauce pasta, only £6.50, would be plenty for lunch.

The new sharing-plates instinct, honed to a reflex, starts to look like old-fashioned greed, and it turns out I crave the same things I wanted when I was eight, a big plate of cheesy pasta washed down with two or three negronis. Mostly the same things, anyway.

Pastaio, 19 Ganton St, London W1F 9BN