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Anyone who reads the restaurant reviews in the newspapers will have noticed how often the reviewers go on about the food being 'authentic'. Chinese restaurants have to have a 'secret' Chinese menu that you need to ask for in an obscure Chinese dialect. Italians have to make their own pasta. And woe betide anyone who tries to make sushi with basmati rice! But it seems to me that, in real life, we could hardly care less about culinary correctness: we choose a restaurant as much for mood, form and price as for anything as insubstantial as its ability to accurately recreate a given cuisine. La Fattoria is the acid test: notably authentic, yet lacking in those basic attributes that we normally associate with the Italian restaurant.
Italian restaurants come weighed down with a suitcase full of expectation and tradition. For many of us the local trattoria is the default venue to enjoy a family event or a dinner for two. We expect it to be suburban, familiar, cosy, unthreatening. But what if it isn't? What if, instead, we are transported to Naples, perhaps to one of those scruffy, noisy, masculine dining rooms that you can find around its central railway station? Dinner will be tasty, filling and cheap, but it will not be any more comfortable than it ought to be. It's real, authentic Italian grub, but it's not what we were looking for.
And that's what we have here. There is no surfeit of comfort to be had at La Fattoria. The room is a featureless cube, decorated with rustic murals and furnished simply and functionally. It feels unnaturally gloomy for such a big space - the more so the further back from the windows you get. The staff are young and Neapolitan. They speak to each other in Don Corleone growls. They are cool, indifferent. My perception is that they can't really be arsed. But it is early, as the meal draws on they warm up and I can see that I have been deceived by their manner.
A risotto starter is soupy, in the Italian way, rich with seafood and tomatoes and served with wedges of good bread. A seafood pasta is similarly well endowed. Chicken salad is generous and features a mysterious but delicious soft cheese. But the raison d'etre for La Fattoria must be its pizza. Made to order at a very public station just inside the front door, mine is good in parts: the base excellent, overlapping the plate and crisp from the edges almost to the centre. It actually comes with pepperoni rather than the salami I ask for, which is OK, but the olives are mushy and bland. The house red wine is a cheeky little number, so cheeky it could do with a good slap.
The fare is decent and substantial, unfussy and robust. But it isn't quite what we're used to. It's authentic, alright - Italian food as per Naples - but I'm not quite sure who it will appeal to. With starters coming in at £7 and mains at £15 to £20, this is the big difference between La Fattoria, Chester and Piazza Garibaldi, Napoli: it is not cheap.
There is no website for you to peruse the menu, but you wouldn't expect that - this is Naples after all.
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