I’m sure you all know by now that I adore Italian cuisine, but I hadn’t actually visited any Italian restaurants nearer to where I live, now that I’m south of the river. A week or so ago, I was kindly invited to try out Eco in Clapham with Ceri – I’d driven past it a few times and it had always looked really cosy and inviting, with a big orange pizza oven in the middle.

We kicked things off with some bread, olives and cocktails – I started on a Bloody Mary (using organic tomato and balsamic) and Ceri had a Gin Giardino (gin, elderflower syrup, apple and cucumber). Both were lovely, although the Gin cocktail had the edge for me, so I moved on to this one afterwards! They were a little too easy to drink!!

The menu really made our mouths water. We were both in the mood for pasta, and it was nice to see quite a wide range of pasta dishes on offer – I’ve found in some Italian restaurants (especially in some chains that I’ll leave to your imagination) that the emphasis is on the pizza and the pasta is a bit of an afterthought, but this certainly wasn’t the case here.

To start with, we ordered the Parma Ham & Burrata Bruschetta and the Arancini (mozzarella and chilli beef, prawn & bisque sauce and porcini truffle oil)

These really were heavenly and packed full of wonderful fresh flavours – I’m a big fan of burrata at the moment and I’ve been thinking about this dish ever since! It’s something fairly simple to serve at home and yet I only seem to eat it when out at lovely restaurants like this.

For the main course, we both went for pasta dishes – I ordered the Venison Ragu with Pappardelle and Ceri went for the Spaghetti Vongole.

Both dishes were gorgeous (the venison was cooked to perfection) and I believe this was actually my first time trying Pappardelle pasta (seems odd but I can’t think where else I’ve eaten it)! I’ll definitely be cooking this at home in future.

Just when we thought we couldn’t eat another bite, we were brought a beautiful orange cake to share, and a Tiramisu cocktail, which we miraculously were able to make some room in our tummies for 😉

It was such a lovely evening and the service was excellent. You could see that there were a lot of regular customers in the restaurant (including a number of Italians) which is always a good sign. I’ll definitely be returning very soon!

If you fancy paying them a visit, you can find out more on their website here.

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I was invited to review Eco Restaurant, but did not receive any payment. All views are my own.