In Clerkenwell, a pasta master works his magic
Find someone in your life who talks about you the way Robert Chambers talks about agnolotti. “There’s a special technique to getting them right,” says the 39-year-old chef, who heads up Luca in Clerkenwell, London, of the Piedmontese pasta variety. “They’re the most perfect shape, like a cushion. They hold the sauce beautifully. When you eat them, they’re just lovely. The shape, the mouthfeel… To be honest, any ravioli or tortellini or agnolotti I can fill with maximum flavour, I just love that.”
Whatever qualms Esquire had about asking a grown man to name his favourite pasta shape were quickly allayed talking to Chambers, for whom pasta — and Italian food in general — is a serious business. Luca is the second finedining restaurant from the founders of the Michelin-starred The Clove Club, and has gained a reputation for Chambers’ “Britalian” menus, combining Italian and British techniques and ingredients in ways that are inventive and surprising but also rigorous and refined. There are the primi, yes, which might include tagliarini of Cornish lobster with tarragon, chilli and garlic; but also the antipasti, like roast Orkney scallops with spicy chickpea and ’nduja; the secondi, such as Hereford beef fillet with friggitello peppers and Parmesan; and don’t even get us started on the dolci (cherry Bakewell tart with pistachio gelato, anyone?).
Chambers, who has been head chef at Luca since it opened five years ago, is something of a Britalian himself, having been brought up by his Italian grandparents in Luton from the age of six. His own interest in restaurants began while helping out at his uncle Michele’s trattoria (not a proper uncle, he explains, but a family friend who, like his nonna and nonno, moved to the UK from Corleto Monforte, a town in Campania where his extended family still has a farm).
“I was a waiter at 12 years old,” he remembers. “I had a little waistcoat, a little tie, and my uncle was quite clever, sending me to all the tables — ‘Aw, little Rob, he’s so cute’ — and they’d leave me £15, £20 tips, which would go into his pocket…”
When he was a child, his aunt Pasqualina taught him some basic techniques — “making gnocchi, fusilli, stuff like that” — and, even through his apathetic teenage years, Chambers’ dedication to pasta remained strong. “We’d go out clubbing, and my friends would have chicken and chips or whatever, and me and my best friend Mario would go home at four o’clock in the morning and cook pasta. It could be aglio e olio: chilli, garlic and parsley, good olive oil, finished with a little bi
