Mennula aims to represent Sicilian cuisine among London's fine-dining Italian
restaurants. Does it do the island justice? Tom Vaughan reports. With Sicily's
rich hotpot of food cultures - settling Greeks, Romans, Moors, Spaniards and
Italians have all left their mark on Sicilian cooking over the last 2,000 years - it's
amazing that London, with a diverse food culture all of its own, has taken this
long to properly showcase the island's national cuisine.
However, when former Zafferano and Number Twelve chef Santino Busciglio
caught wind through his suppliers that Passione in London's Charlotte Street was
closing down, that all changed. Teaming up with business partner Joe Martorana,
the pair set about filling the Sicilian-shaped hole in the capital's dining scene with
a bijou 44-seat restaurant, which they called Mennula (Sicilian for almond).
"A lot of chefs in London play around with Sicilian food, but don't do it full
justice," says Busciglio.
"I've always wanted to cook my own food, and what I love is Sicilian."
Born in Sicily and brought up in Lancashire, Busciglio returned to the country of
his birth to learn Sicilian cooking from his baker grandmother. The result is, in
cases, a real dedication to authenticity.
"In the past we've put on a split fava bean soup that is as old as Sicily itself, and
Sicilians have been in to say they struggle to find such cooking at home," says
Busciglio.
"It's a bit like a Brit putting a steak and kidney pudding on the menu -
sometimes they shy away from it."
Overall, Mennula's menu is a mix of the traditional and the modern. Arancini, a
very Sicilian form of deep-fried rice croquettes, arrives as a canapé, and might
be followed by the very simple dried broad bean soup with fennel, rosemary oil
and crostino (£6.50). However, both sit next to the much more demanding
grilled squid in a salty potato sauce, with capers, a spaghetti of roasted peppers,
and olive pâté (£8.50) - one of the only dishes to survive a new year menu
overhaul, as Busciglio, in his own words, "flexed his muscles" and showed there's
much more to come from the restaurant.
At times the menu sways towards dishes from more pan-Italian osterias - wild
boar ravioli with white truffle butter (£14.50), for example - at others, such as
with the Sicilian aubergine salad with buffalo mozzarella, it is clearly under heavy
influence from Sicily. And throughout, there is the gentle undertone of the
island's finest produce - the olives; green, peppery olive oil; blood oranges; and
almonds. Imported, as you might expect, from Sicily, the nuts run through
countless dishes. Gnocchi comes with an almond, tomato and basil pesto
(£8.50), while seared diver-caught scallops are served with lentils, baby spinach,
chilli and almonds (£11.50), and roasted rump of lamb is accompanied by
almond and mint pesto (£19).
Busciglio has tapped into the capital's Giorgio Locatelli-inspired taste for a sort of
homogenised Italian cuisine, while still playing true to Siciliy's culinary heritage.
The lamb dish, which showcases the same clean, produce-centred characteristics
that mark all of Busciglio's cooking, is perfectly suited to a slightly
unadventurous top-end diner, yet the almond pesto gives it a personality of its
own. And beside it on the menu is rabbit wrapped in pancetta with aubergine
sauce, spaghetti of carrots, pine nuts, sultanas and black cabbage; a dish that
captures Sicily and its love of vegetables, rabbit and the little exotic touches -
like nuts and sultanas - that 2,000 years of foreign settlers have brought to the
national cuisine.
Desserts also mix the inoffensive with the authentic. There's a fine-dining take
on tiramisu (£6.50), next to semifreddo (almond flavour, of course) and a superb
cassata (£6.50) - a Sicilian dessert of layered sponge with marzipan, pistachio,
chocolate, ricotta and candied fruits (£6.50).
However, the dedication to Sicily in many of the dishes is only half the story. In
its superb and knowledgeable Sicilian front-of-house team, its honouring of the
country through much of the wine list and its real sense of identity, the
restaurant lets Busciglio achieve exactly what he set out to do - "show off for
Sicily".
WHAT'S ON THE MENU
Carpaccio of smoked duck breast with blood orange salad, £10.50
Baby artichokes, rocket and fonduta di Ragusano, £8.50
Seared salt crust tuna with sweet and sour red onions, £9.50
Cream of lobster soup with soured mascarpone and almonds, £9.50
Warm salad of poached wild sea bass, samphire, artichokes and sun-blushed
cherry tomates with vino cotto, £19.50
Grilled swordfish, celery, green olives, capers and cherry tomatoes with mashed
potatoes, £17.50
Traditional Sicilian cannoli filled with sweet ewe's ricotta, £6.50
Cinnamon cream-filled sfinci with honey, toasted sesame seeds and almond icecream,
£6.50
Mixed cheese platter, £13
Great restaurants can come in very small packages,
10th January 2010
Sunday Telegraph
Stella Magazine 10th January 2010
Stella rating: 8/10
Whoever set up this restaurant is daft. I want to go back in time, to their meeting with the
bank manager, and say, 'Instead of borrowing, say, 75 grand, could we borrow 76?’ Or
whatever small but noticeable amount it would have taken to make the interior match the
food. Inside is absolutely titchy. Well, that’s just life; some buildings are small. But instead
of getting an interior designer, I contend that they just got a student in, to say things like,
'Course you could fit a banquette in there. These are only people you’re expecting. They’re
not elephants.’ The purple suedette banquettes are very tight. The corners were apparently
joined together with an office stapler and are already coming apart, and, while we’re at it,
what on earth are they doing with suedette? Either use a bona fide animal product, or a fabric.
Suedette is like buying your mum a present in T K Maxx: you think you’ll sneak it past her,
but you won’t.
I hate to be predictable, but even at the bread course I realised it was all worth it. Beauteous
squidgy, salty focaccia, a delicious bun of mainly chickpea flour, some lovely grissini – it
was a masterclass in southern European carbohydrate, and we hadn’t even ordered yet. I had
the smoked goose breast, radicchio, chestnuts and balsamic (£11.50), and it was great.
The tendency with smoked meat is that it stops tasting of meat and tastes only of smoke. But
this was really goosey. And yet also smoky. And the chestnut added a rich but chalky,
moreish but classy, extra bit of loveliness. Even the radicchio touched my heart. I lunched
with my friend, J , who had the burrata, beetroot and grilled courgette (£9). The cheese – a
super-creamy version of mozzarella – was excessively generous and looked like a giant pair
of flouncy Victorian knickers. She prodded it and said, 'That is about 5,000 calories.’ I
prodded it and a little came away (accidentally) on my fork. It was amazing. It was amazingly
creamy. You know how sometimes you wonder why mozzarella doesn’t taste of very much?
That is just the wrong kind of mozzarella. Done right, it tastes like the beginning of all
cheese; it tastes like ur-cheese. The beetroot was nice as well. But that feels a little beside the
point, as pink as it is.
I continued with the calf’s liver (£17.50), done in the 1980s fashion where you stack all the
ingredients neatly into a tower, like you’re playing a corporate Japanese team-game: mashed
spuds (very good, pretty rustic, not overly buttery but certainly buttery enough); spinach
(nice, ever so verdant and beefy, really halfway to curly kale, except not curly); liver (solid
but not daunting, pink, tasting very much of itself, exquisite really); speck (arranged like
bacon, traditional but with a twist, deeper and sweeter than bacon); and deep-fried sage like a
savoury cherry on top. J fared slightly less well with the strozzapreti with rabbit, olives and
tomatoes (£9.50) – the pasta, a kind of hand-folded penne, was a bit floppy and the rabbit,
though slowly cooked to yield a soft, wild flavour, had small, disconcerting bones in it that I
thought could have been removed without causing outlandish hassle.
We shared a cassata (£6.50), though if I had my time again I would choose instead from a
very expert-looking cheeseboard. I once heard someone describe cassata as the Sophia Loren
of cakes, which has left me with an irrational fondness for it. In fact, as J pointed out, it’s like
every dodgy Christmas offering you’ve ever thrown away, in one cake: marzipan, candied
fruit, chocolate, cake, ricotta, socks… too much! Authentic, mind. Warm, welcoming staff
rounded off the totality of this southern Italian experience (mennula means 'almond’ in
Sicilian dialect, by the way).
In the end I came to see the deficiencies of space and planning as just one more signal of their
gastro sure-footedness.
RECENT QUOTES
“Great restaurants can come in very small packages”
“I hate to be predictable, but even at the bread course I realised it was all worth it.”
“Warm, welcoming staff rounded off the totality of this southern Italian experience.”
(The Telegraph, Stella Magazine, January 2010, Zoe Williams)
“We were on a bit of a scoff and run…I will go back for longer, lazier lunches in the
spring.”
(The Times Magazine, January 2010, Giles Coren)
“The simple but stylishly designed restaurant exudes confidence in its own ability…”
(Time Out London, December 2009, Guy Dimond)
“…the menu has a smack of authenticity”
“There’s nothing particularly flashy about Mennula; the lion’s share of the work has
gone into getting the food right, rather than “the concept”.”
(The Independent on Sunday, December 2009, Toby Young)
“This is, however, one of those rare establishments to which, we’d like to return.”
(Harden’s.com, November 2009, Peter & Richard Harden)
“Meals are conceived as an unfolding celebration”
“In the main course, thoughtfulness, innovation and dextrous matching don’t let
up…”
(Evening Standard, November 2009, Fay Maschler)
'Godfather' gags are the only thing out of place at Mennula
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Mennula, 10 Charlotte Street, London W1
'Godfather' gags are the only thing out of place at Mennula, a Sicilian that's authentic in (almost) every way
Reviewed by Toby Young
The Independent on Sunday
When I told my friend we would be meeting at a Sicilian restaurant, he made the obvious gag: "I'll be disappointed if there isn't a gun taped to the back of the cistern."
Mennula on Charlotte Street is about as far as you can get from the family-style Italian restaurant in The Godfather where Michael Corleone shoots Virgil Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. It's in an L-shaped room that feels as though it has been squeezed into a thin, narrow strip by the larger buildings on either side. There are few round tables here – not enough room – just a series of banquettes upholstered with purple cushions. With its modular furniture and plain, white walls, it's more like the set of a Stanley Kubrick movie than one of Francis Ford Coppola's.
The owner is Santino Busciglio and he makes no apologies for the modest interior. "I didn't want to saddle myself with huge overheads," he says. "All I ever wanted was a nice little restaurant I could call my own." Mennula can accommodate about 40 covers and was three-quarters full when I visited, which suggests the chef-patron has the business model about right. Not bad for a Tuesday lunchtime.
Busciglio was born in Agrigento in Sicily, but moved to Bolton when he was a boy. After a stint with the A-Z group at Rosmarino, Alloro and Zafferano, he ended up languishing in the kitchen of a hotel off the Euston Road. He first started thinking about opening his own place four years ago, but it wasn't until this site in Fitzrovia became available that he made the leap. It was formerly the home of Passione, Gennaro Contaldo's restaurant. "I've looked at quite a few premises over the years and this place just leapt out at me," he says. "You know the right one when you see it."
There may be nothing particularly Sicilian about the décor of Mennula, but the menu has the smack of authenticity. The à la carte menu is divided into four sections, beginning with antipasti, followed by zuppa, pasta e riso, then secondi di pesce, carne e selvaggina (fish, meat and game) and, finally, dolci. Prices are on the high side and if four courses feels a little extravagant, there's a set menu offering two for £17.50 or three for £19.50.
My companion – a political fixer – opts to start with squid accompanied by potato sauce, peppers, capers and tapenade, while I cannot resist the in-season white Alba truffle grated over tagliatelle. Admittedly, this adds £25 to the bill and customers are supposed to be limited to five grams of this ambrosia, but the head waiter is happy to keep grating until I tell him to stop. Both first courses are a great success, particularly the squid.
For my main course, I have calf's liver served on a little mound of mashed potato and accompanied by spinach, onion marmalade and speck, while my friend has pork belly with polenta, black cabbage and apple chutney. The calf's liver is perfectly cooked and full of rich, earthy flavours, but the presentation on the plate is a little too fussy, making the quantity appear smaller than it is. Again, my companion is more than happy with his choice, claiming it is well worth suspending his diet for.
As our second courses are being cleared, Busciglio emerges from the kitchen and starts making the rounds of his lunchtime customers. We're both pretty stuffed at this point, but the affable chef insists we try some of his deserts – and not because he wants to maximise his takings. He's just very proud of his food.
I end up with the Sicilian cassata – a layered sponge with chocolate, ricotta and candied fruits – while my friend has the cannoli filled with ricotta, prompting him to quote The Godfather again: "Leave the gun, take the cannoli." The cannoli is the undoubted star here. Busciglio returned to Sicily aged 16 and spent two years living with his grandmother, the village baker, who evidently taught him a thing or two. The pastry is crisp with a slightly burnt flavour that acts as a lovely counterpoint to the sweetness of the ricotta.
There's nothing particularly flashy about Mennula; the lion's share of the work has gone into getting the food right. But if you're after simple Sicilian food, lovingly prepared by a talented chef, this is the place to come.
Bringing a taste of Sicily to Charlotte Street
8th December 2009
The ViewLondon Review
Review by Michelle Court.
Bringing a taste of Sicily to Charlotte Street, Mennula offers a modern take on traditional Italian food.
The Venue
A small, narrow venue on Charlotte Street, Mennula faces stiff competition from the multitude of restaurants that line the road. The pretty white frontage, topped with purple lettering, makes it stand out and once inside the purple and white colour scheme continues. There are only a few tables; whilst some seem to need negotiating to get in and out, the high-backed purple booths are comfortable. Budding purple tree boughs are stencilled on the walls, keeping the design simple, modern and trendy. It’s a far cry from the decor of typical Italian restaurants you often find in Central London – no garlic bulbs? no olive oil? – but it’s all the better for it.
The Atmosphere
Despite the modern interior Mennula feels warm and welcoming, with enthusiastic waiters that are well versed on the menu – if you choose a signature Sicilian dish they seem so pleased it’s almost as if they’re cooking it themselves. The crowd seems mainly to be made up of couples and small groups of friends, although that might be due to the venue’s small size – it would be hard for groups of more than four to sit comfortably.
The Food
The menu at Mennula is modern Italian, with Sicilian influences making themselves known courtesy of a few Mediterranean touches. Prices aren’t unreasonable for the area and there’s enough variety that the meal doesn’t have to be expensive – also, for an extra £4, any of the antipasti or pasta dishes can be ordered as a main. A set lunch and pre-theatre menu costs £17.50 for two courses and £19.50 for three.
Beef carpaccio (£10.50), a classic dish, is slightly unusual as it’s cut thicker than you may expect. It’s paired nicely with shavings of Parmesan, lemon dressing and a few tart capers; their sharp, salty taste is a good match for the beef. Squid served with potato sauce, roasted peppers and olive pate (£8.50) is fresh, with a good texture and colourful presentation. The potato sauce is subtly flavoured but adds a luxurious creaminess to the dish.
Potato gnocci (£8.50 as a starter, £12.50 as a main) seems like a simple dish but the flavours really come through well. The gnocci is soft and the nutty pesto sauce – made with almonds, which is what Mennula means in Sicilian – has a delicate but rich taste, brightened up by cherry tomatoes, roasted so that they’re almost falling apart into the sauce. Pork belly with black cabbage and apple chutney (£17.50) is a decent portion and the meat is good quality but ever so slightly dry – a dab or two of the apple chutney is more than enough to sort it out, though.
The dessert menu is almost as long as the first two courses, with plenty of delicious looking cheese options paired with interesting accompaniments like fennel-scented honey, baked pears and toasted walnuts. A mixed cheese platter is £13. If you go for the sweet stuff, though, about seven options are available from £6.50 to £7. The traditional Sicilian cannoli, a crisp pastry tube filled with ewe’s ricotta, is brilliant. The filling is so sweet that you could almost fool yourself into thinking that you’re eating frosting if not for the slight tang of cheese behind the sugar. Baba with limoncello is pretty big and might be hard to finish if you’ve had a starter and main as well. Almost like a hot pound cake, it’s moist and dense, although they’ve really gone to town with the limoncello – best to keep the dessert wine to the minimum if you order this.
The Drink
An all Italian wine list sees Sicilian wine taking centre stage, with more than half a dozen wines from the region mixed in amongst Italian classics. Plenty are available by the glass (from £3.35) and carafe (from £6.70) and bottles start at a reasonable £13.40. Fine wines (£120 to £380) and fine Champagnes (£119.50 to £170) are available if you’re looking to impress, but otherwise bottles top out at £92 for a Barolo from Piedmont. For whites, the Itynera Grillo from Siciliy (£4.20, £8.40, £16.80) is a sweet, aromatic Sauvignon whilst the Sicilian Sangiovese Syrah (£3.85, £7.70, £15.40) is full bodied, with spicy flavours.
A decent selection of sweet wine, port and grappa completes the list along with several types of spirits. Coffees and teas, with petits fours featuring bits of cannoli, are also available.
The Last Word
A blend of traditional and innovative, Mennula’s friendly atmosphere makes it ideal for a quiet dinner with friends. If you think you’ve seen all there is from Italian cuisine, this restaurant may surprise you.
**** Modern Italian in Fitzrovia
Time Out London November 2009
Modern Italian in Fitzrovia
By Guy Dimond
Once upon a time, ristorantes and trattorias simply served ‘Italian food’. Now, they’re rustic, regional, or refined. And in some cases, such as Mennula, they can be all three.
Sicilian-born chef-patron Santino Busciglio was brought up in the UK, but he has taught himself his family’s culinary heritage, both while living in Sicily as a teenager and then working his way through some of London’s best Italian restaurants: Rosmarino, Zafferano and Alloro, among others.
His menu at Mennula lists ‘priest-choker’ (strozzapreti) pasta with rabbit, Sicilian cassata and a well-chosen selection from Sicily’s resurgent wine producers on the all-Italian list. It’s more Italian than most.
‘Mennula’ means ‘almond’ in the Sicilian dialect, and Busciglio’s home village is in the island’s almond-growing area.
But his style of cooking is much more contemporary and refined than Sicilian home cooking, a fact underlined by this Fitzrovia site also being self-consciously smarter than London’s other Sicilian restaurants.
Mennula occupies the slim, L-shaped site that used to be Gennaro Contaldo’s Passione restaurant, which was also good, if pricey.
The new restaurant exudes a similar confidence in its own ability; manager Angelo Todaro used to work at Zafferano, so he knows how to run a slick operation.
Not so all his young staff, though: we waited half an hour for our wine order. Meanwhile, we relished our complimentary appetisers of lightly-smoked almonds, lemon-marinated olives and arancini that were ambrosial: the thin, crisply fried shell encasing a molten, cheese-rich ball of risotto.
The menu’s clearly laid out and reassuringly brief; fancy plates pretty-up the more rustic dishes, such as a a glass bowl of scored then grilled squid served in a soup-like sauce of leek, potato and olive oil with a little thyme, given distinctively Italian notes by a scoop of black olive paste and capers.
Some dishes are more Brit-Italian in style, such as a perfectly cooked round of pork belly, seasoned with fennel seeds and cracked pepper, served with a firm apple sauce and a dollop of white polenta.
At first glance it resembles a Sunday roast, but the gravy is a translucent jus of chicken bones, and the firm savoy cabbage under the meat is a big improvement on the soggy British norm.
In Sicily, cannoli are cigar-sized tubes of fried pastry filled with flavoured ricotta cheese. In the US, they have become overblown, overly-sweet confections, but Mennula’s are closer to the real thing, with crisp, dark pastry flavoured with coffee, cocoa and marsala wine, and a plain filling of ewe’s milk ricotta, sprinkled with grated chocolate.
Our visit was in the early days and some aspects of the service needed some smoothing out, but Mennula’s already showing great promise and reliably good cooking. A nut by name perhaps, but not by nature.
•
**** Sicily, mi amore at Mennula - Evening Standard
November 19th 2009
It’s a terrible name, sounding like an instrument essential to an IVF procedure, but Mennula (apparently the word for almond in Sicilian dialect) is a great addition to the restaurants of Charlotte Street. It replaces Passione where after nearly a decade the eponymous emotion felt by owner Gennaro Contaldo seemed more directed at his former protégé Jamie Oliver than his own restaurant kitchen.
Mennula’s chef/patron is Santino Busciglio, who previously toiled away in a hotel off Euston Road. His praiseworthy efforts there were circumscribed by all-purpose surroundings and seemingly an obligation to anglicise some offerings. Busciglio’s story has all the ingredients that one day will satisfy a TV producer.
Born in Agrigento in Sicily, he moved with his parents to Bolton, Lancashire, where he remembers family meals around the kitchen table lovingly prepared by his mother Rosa. From an early age he was fascinated by wild food and would accompany his father on shooting and fishing expeditions.
At 16 he returned to the country of his birth to spend two years living with his beloved “nonna” (grandmother), who for 25 years was the village baker. Training as a chef took him to Manchester, Paris and Brussels, and then in London he worked for the A-Z Group at Rosmarino, Alloro and Zafferano. When you meet Busciglio he doesn’t sound Italian at all, but he looks and cooks the part.
Meals are conceived as an unfolding celebration, from the smoked almonds — reminds me of flying first-class, said one of my companions — intense green olives and light, crisp, elastic arancini brought to the table at the start to biscotti at the end for dipping into wine or coffee. Homemade breads include small fat pizzas with a topping of tomatoes incorporated into the dough — a Sicilian rendition, we were told — bread sticks and wholemeal rolls.
A first course of red mullet, fresh orange, baby spinach heated just until it had knuckled under and almonds was a perfect array of flavours and textures, one of those dishes that make you sit up and think again about the potential for pleasure in dining. Cauliflower soup with Gorgonzola and black olives had a texture more like purée than soup. The combination of innocuous but subtle vegetable, feisty cheese and wicked black olive judiciously balanced was a triumph. “Balance” was a word also invoked in the reaction to baby artichokes with a fonduta made from Ragusano, a Sicilian raw cows’ milk cheese.
Sprinkled with arugula, it was admired for its greeny, zesty richness and for the tame temperature. “I love tepid,” said the recipient.
Pasta dishes chosen as a main course attract a £4 surcharge, punishment I suppose for not eating like an Italian and going the four-course route. The hand-rolled strozzapreti (meaning “priest choker”) is described as sauced with rabbit, olives and Pachino tomatoes, which come from guess where? Sicily, Syracuse to be precise.
There was no mention of the strong presence of tarragon or maybe fennel seeds — she who chose the dish couldn’t make up her mind — but it was praised again for balance, this time of bitter and sweet. A little extra dish slipped our way, of potato gnocchi sauced with a pesto made from almonds, basil and tomato, enables me to recommend that as well.
In the main course, thoughtfulness, innovation and dexterous matching don’t let up. Roasted halibut is served with wilted lettuce, a rather peculiar but pleasing cobbling together of crab, potatoes and capers. Fillet of Scottish beef, a handsome, almost square chunk of meat, is flattered by accompaniments of celeriac and wild mushrooms. Now, as I re-read the menu, I wonder why I didn’t choose mallard with chard and a risotto made of black truffle-scented Carnaroli rice. Next time.
The white truffle season is upon us — very good this year, mutter the experts — and for £25 you can have it shaved on to scrambled duck eggs, tagliatelle, risotto or beef Carpaccio. The trick is to engage the server in animated dialogue as he starts grating and hope he will blithely carry on as he thinks up answers to your questions. The manager, Angelo Todaro, formerly at Zafferano and who resembles the young Danny Kaye, might fall for it but he’s probably too much of a pro.
Of the two Sicilian desserts we tried, cassata possessed tooth-aching sweetness but crisp canola filled with only gently sweetened ewe’s ricotta and studded with candied fruit achieved better — what’s that word I’m looking for? — balance.
All this clearly heartfelt effort is for a tiny restaurant seating 40-odd. The refit of white walls and mirror panels does its best to maximise a tight space. A wooden cut-out arguably reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Blossoming Almond Tree provides decoration. But in culinary creativity and affection for his homeland, you get chef Busciglio’s message - it’s a small thing but mine own.
By Fay Maschler
Santino Busciglio to open new restaurant on former site of Passione
September 23rd 2009
A new Italian restaurant is set to open in London next month on the former site of Gennaro Contaldo’s famous Passione restaurant, which closed in March this year.
Mennula, which will open in the site on Charlotte Street in mid-October, is a joint venture from chef Santino Busciglio and business partner Joe Martorana.
The 44-seat restaurant will comprise three distinct areas including a main dining room and a private dining room, with interiors featuring Venetian wall covers, walnut floors, and both banquettes and stand-alone tables.
Formerly the head chef of the Number Twelve and Vault restaurants in London, Busciglio will lead a brigade of six chefs in the kitchen and serve a modern Italian menu focused on dishes from Sicily.
Mennula will offer an à la carte menu of around seven antipasti, pasta, risotto and meat dishes as well as a set menu priced £17.50 for two- and £19.50 for three courses.
Front of house will be overseen by restaurant manager Angelo Todaro, who was previously restaurant manager of the Michelin-starred Zafferano in Belgravia.
“Mennula is a very personal project and inspired by Sicily, where both myself and my business partner Joe are from,” Busciglio told Caterersearch.
“The menu will be an extension of me and we will offer great value for money.”
