Inside: Union Street Cafe

Decorated with the laid back luxe of a Manhattan loft, Union Street Café’s daily-changing, all-Italian menu will delight your senses from early lunch to late night cocktails.

Vibe

New York industrial chic, with high windows, concrete floors, old headlamps, and exposed pipes on the ceiling. The dining room is spacious and dotted with circular tables and comfortable leather chairs. The upstairs mezzanine, which can be reserved as a private dining space, peers into the open plan kitchen, and is decorated with turquoise leather banquettes and a wall of convex mirrors. The crowd is a healthy mixture of relaxed business men and women around lunchtime, and faithful local dwellers in the evenings.

Food

Davide Degiovanni’s seasonal, daily-changing dishes are influenced by authentic family recipes and pack all the flavour you’d expect from a born-and-bred Italian head chef. Start light with antipasti, such as spiky carciofi (artichokes) with ricotta, liquorice and lemon, or the beef “al coltello” with its chanterelle mushrooms and parmesan shavings. The primis are all about pasta, such as the pheasant tagliolini with winter truffle, or the veal sausage rigatoni with black cabbage and gorgonzola. Those with room to spare can venture into the secondis, with grilled squid with Calabrian ‘nduja, and the guineafowl with soft polenta as seasonal highlights.

Signature dish

The menu changes daily, but the ox cheeks, and the stracciatella - a soft cheese produced from Italian buffalo milk in the province of Foggia - are always firm favourites when they’re in season. The homemade pastas are, of course, also entirely unmissable.

Drink

This is where Union Street Café packs an unexpected punch - venture down the stairs at the back of the dining room and you’ll find Union Street Bar: a vast and impeccably decorated social space, where the cocktails are the star of the show. Sink into one of the sofas and sip on a house creation, such as the Truffle Martini; a gin sour with a hint of truffle, and a little garnish of sea salt and cocoa powder, or the Agave Symphony, which mixes Olmeca tequila with Mezcal and Limoncello, topped with homemade strawberry and ginger soda.

Budget

An average spend at Union Street Café can be estimated at £35-40 per head, including wine.

View Union Street Cafe menus and book a table at Union Street Cafe.