It used to be that word about a halfway decent cacio e pepe would spread like a sexy rumour through the city, be something you'd travel across London for.
Now we've got artisan tagliarini being hand-rolled all over the city; amazing sauces being swooped up by amazing focaccia in every neighbourhood, and new contenders opening all the time. The bar is high for pasta places in London, and if we hadn't been strict with ourselves, this list would've been 40-strong.
Here's what we boiled it down to.
Manteca, Shoreditch
Would love to have a fresh new take on Manteca, but ours is the same as, basically, everybody else's. It's just great. Not only great at pasta — we'd find it hard not to repeat order the beef battuta every visit (tartare-esque raw meat, laced with dandelion, comes with paper-thin crispbread), the fire-cooked cuts of meat, or the miso-roasted cabbage studded with pancetta. OK, and the chocolate and salt caramel torte.
But the pasta? Next level. It's a regularly changing menu, but the brown crab cacio e pepe is ridiculously, silkily rich, crabby, and beautiful; the rigatoni with kale and garlic — which we order mostly just to be completist and to show we're not actually frightened of vegetables — is a surprising, instant favourite; and the duck ragù fazzoletti (little scattering of duck fat pangrattato) is one we're still thinking about weeks later. Besides that, the wine list's gorgeous in a nonchalant, unformulaic way (small-batch pet nats jostling with Italian greatest hits); service is very friendly and utterly unceremonious; and the buzz is the exact right level to feel like you're at the relaxed epicentre of a very good party.
Manteca, Shoreditch
Campania, Shoreditch
It's been around long enough that the bare-bulb, ramshackle, slightly ex-schoolroom look of the space has slid in and out of fashion, probably on repeat — but Campania endures, mostly unchanged, waiting to serve you lobster scialatielli and slow-cooked rabbit, and whatever on their short menu they haven't run out of when you arrive. Tables spill out onto the streets on summer evenings, and service is languorously slow, and you could — if you look past the very much zone 1 London prices — be on an Amalfi coast street corner.
Campania, Shoreditch
This is a sponsored inclusion on behalf of EatClub.
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Ombra, Bethnal Green
Not primarily a pasta place, but very good at it, Ombra could get by on the allure of their little timber-framed terrace alone. Luckily they also have three or four outstanding pasta dishes on the short menu — changing regularly, but in several 'bring us one of everything' evenings there, we haven't found a pasta we wouldn't repeat order, immediately.
Ombra, Bethnal Green
Officina '00, Old Street and Fitzrovia
The small table-size at Officina's a problem, because the pasta is all good-to-great and you will want it in amounts that demand impossible feats of plate-Tetris. The pasta menu changes regularly, but if the agnolotti with burrata, bottarga and lemon's on there — or the pappardelle with short rib ragù — order them in wild abundance, modest table-size be damned. Also: don't miss the fried cacio e pepe raviolo — coin-sized hits of crunchy, rich heat.
Officina '00, Old Street and Fitzrovia
E Pellicci, Bethnal Green
The pasta's more of an excuse to go to E Pellicci, rather than the reason, though the lasagna's good. Great actually. Actually, some sort of Platonic archetype of lasagna. But Pellicci's isn't a trad pastificio, it's closer to a British caff filtered through a very Italian prism, with the pasta dishes on the menu massively outnumbered by the fry-ups and chicken sandwiches. Still one of the most joyful places in London to eat half your bodyweight in just-like-nonna-used-to-make ragù.
E Pellicci, Bethnal Green
Flour & Grape, Bermondsey
Home-rolled pappardelle, hand-crimped gigli, a long list of Italian wines by the decent-priced carafe — and it's somewhere you can actually make reservations. Good wine bar downstairs, if you're waiting for a table. Plus the nice touch of every pasta dish coming in small or large. Sounds initially pointless (large, obviously), till you realise how elegantly easy this makes it to double pasta for dinner — pasta for starter, pasta for main. And we're not going to judge you if you go pasta for dessert.
Flour & Grape, Bermondsey
Popolo, Shoreditch
This tucked-away Rivington Street trattoria comes with industrial looks, and a menu that bounces around western Europe but with Italy carrying the weight of it, with some very very good pasta dishes making up about half of the quite short menu.
Popolo, Shoreditch
Pophams, Hackney
Probably not surprising that the evolution into evenings for beloved daytime bakery Pophams involves equally great carbs, this time via a short, all-killer no-filler pasta menu.
In theory, you know the score when a restaurant doing fresh pasta opens in this part of east London: beautiful heavy stoneware, beautiful delicate glassware, vivid, seasonal produce, thoughtful, eclectic natural wine menu. But Pophams is even better than the sum of those — tbf very nice — parts, thanks to outstandingly good pasta dreamed up and served up by the Italian-majority pastry chefs on the bakery staff.
Look out for dishes like the triangolini, singing with peas, green chilli and preserved lemon, or the casoncelli sitting in such a deep pool of guanciale and parmesan sauce it's borderline a soup. It also helps that Pophams is a truly great setting for the kind of unhurried evening that pasta this good deserves: spacious enough that you're not elbow-to-elbow with other tables, but candlelit enough that it feels intimate, plus a patio bonus-level to unlock on summer visits with seating spilling out into the sunshine. Absolutely no notes.
Pophams, Hackney
Norma, Fitzrovia
More than just a nice space — OK, a very beautiful, Moorish-meets-Sicilian-meets-Orient-Express-carriage space — Ben Tish's restaurant also happens to be doing a handful of spectacular pasta dishes. Expect southern Italian classics tempered with north African influences.
Norma, Fitzrovia
Noci, Angel, and other locations around London
They're going for a mix of classics and theatre here — dishes like the fazzoletti with an egg yolk balancing on top like a spring sunrise are also, despite being very much aimed at your Instagram, actually fantastic. Same goes for imo the best pasta on the menu, the paccheri with veal and pork Genovese ragù, Tête de Moine cheese whirled onto it, tableside, from a cheese curler. A lot of swagger, but also a lot of substance.
Actual favourite dish of the menu, though, when we visited, wasn't even a pasta — the leek, walnut and taleggio torta fritta, little fried, light, chewy, tensile, cheese-stuffed envelopes of dough. Not that striking to look at, but to taste? Chef's kiss.
Noci, Angel, and other locations around London
Via Emilia, Shoreditch and Fitzrovia
Both of Via Emilia's Shoreditch and Fitzrovia restaurants come with the same lowkey, lowlit nonchalance and spectacular Emilia-Romagna menu. Tortellini in brodo, a lot of stuffed pasta, a lot of cured meat, and the bonus presence of the rarely-sighted-on-a-London-menu squacquerone. You love to see it.
Via Emilia, Shoreditch and Fitzrovia
Marcella, Deptford
The second restaurant from the team behind (the also great) Artusi in Peckham, Marcella's built along similar lines — simple, Scandi-spartan space, short and spectacular menus, good wine at good prices. Like Artusi, they've turned a tiny, neighbourhood space into something that eclipses any number of bigger, flashier spots.
Marcella, Deptford
Padella, Borough and Shoreditch
The OG of the sharing-plates fresh pasta scene in London, Padella is still usually (and justifiably) packed out. Not much has changed over the years: it's still seasonal pasta dishes, often riffing on British ingredients — tagliarini punchy with Dorset crab, ravioli stuffed with English ricotta. Bar vibes rather than restaurant, and queues to deter all but the most dedicated, it wouldn't be our choice for a rowdy group dinner or knees-brushing-knees date night, but if you're looking for a little lunchtime drop-in or a mid-afternoon pasta refuel, it's a classic for a reason.
Padella, Borough and Shoreditch
Gloria, Shoreditch
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Want your pasta to come in a giant wheel of parmesan, to a thumping backing track of Andreotti-era Raffaella Carrà? Maybe a flaming cocktail or two, jostling for aesthetic real estate with all the kitsch maximalism? Big Mamma Group to the rescue, with their OG London trattoria — though their other restaurants, including Circolo Popolare in Fitzrovia, are going to deliver a lot of the same 70s rowdiness and truffle-on-everything vibes.
Gloria, Shoreditch
Passione Vino, Shoreditch
This pocket-sized Shoreditch wine shop is seductive. You might think you're dropping in for one glass of wine, and find yourself hours later, still there, scraping up ragù from an empty plate and ordering another bottle of low intervention Italian wine from small, artisan producers — the passione is catching. The food menu's short, regularly changing, and reliably lovely.
Passione Vino, Shoreditch
Polentina, Bow
In a very IYKYK location — one where, even IYK, it's actually still quite hard to find — Polentina's tucked into a corner of an ecoclothing factory. In a small warehouse. In a quiet corner of Bow. The small kitchen serves a regularly changing menu that zooms in on different Italian regions, often with a sizeable sprinkle of offal dishes, always with a couple of incredible pasta dishes in the mix.
Polentina, Bow
Ciao Bella, Bloomsbury
A big, expansive place where the pasta's either pretty good — huge portions, decent prices — or sometimes outstanding (spaghetti alle vongole, we're looking at you), but it doesn't really matter because you're there for the mood.
It's a place where people cluster till midnight smoking or drinking under the awning outside, and inside people are sitting on each other's laps, arms slung over each other's shoulders, or, possibly, climbing onto a chair to sing happy birthday. There are probably a few Hollywood celebrities tucked into dimly-lit corners. Seafood spaghetti comes in a big paper bag, upended steaming onto your plate, and your after-dinner digestivi probably come as a selection of full-sized bottles, crammed onto your table for you to dip into at will. Vivid green-gold oil on everything. Chance of a song being smashed out on the piano: high. It's a very dolce-vita-meets-lock-in-at-your-local-pub vibe. We've never met somebody who'd been to Ciao Bella who didn't fall for it.
Ciao Bella, Bloomsbury
