Il Borro, London: "The music was bad, the pasta pathetic" - restaurant review

Il Borro, 15 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DY. Starters £14-£35, pasta £17-£53, second £29-£75, desserts £11-£16, wines from £50

C' It was when they started pumping a sweet, singsong cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart into the dining room that I really started to lose the will to live. We had already been subjected to sterilized versions of Madonna classics. Now, Il Borro's DJ brought us an ugly, disfigured cover of Manchester gloomster's finest. I wasn't sure which was worse: the lousy music or the seafood pasta with just a langoustine, prawn, three clams and three mussels for £46. In fact, I was sure. The music was very bad. The average pasta was truly dismal.

Il Borro opened its doors last November in a cavernous two-storey marble and blond wood site near Berkeley Square in London, and is a spin-off of upscale Italian winery Il Borro near Arezzo, owned by luxury fashion brand Salvatore Ferragamo. In Mayfair, this last sentence functions as preliminaries. The restaurant's website says it wants to introduce us all to their "Tuscan way of life". This Tuscan way of life involves enough beige furniture to excite a White Company buyer, terrible tartan suits for the head waiters, and a menu whose price is partly bored by the wealthy.

So why go there? Two reasons. First, this man can't live on small plates and “tidy” lists of natural wines served only in old warehouses. Shadow and light, people. Light and shadow. And second, Il Borro has the words "Tuscan Bistro" above the door. It's intriguing because London had one just two months before it opened. Russell Norman's Brutto is something of an elbow-room spot on the table in Clerkenwell, knocking out robust plates of panzanella for £8.40 and penne for ten. The basic proposition is exactly the same; the price and the approach, a little less. Obviously, Il Borro has Mayfair rents and laundry fees to meet and a DJ with extremely questionable tastes to support. But even taking that into account, I wanted to know: does more money buy you better food?

No. It's not. It gives you access to an eerie, roaring alternate reality, where tables of open-necked men stare at their phones, their faces bathed in a blue glow, or bark at each other about the latest best deals. ...