The Fenland Gent

20 years ago, when I lived in the area, Lee on Solent High Street seemed stuck in the fifties. Maybe the fact that it was not pedestrianised, and that it still had a greengrocers and a butchers made it seem so out of place in the late eighties. Skip forward twenty years and not much has changed, this rather tatty road still has the feeling of somewhere that has been left behind, stuck somehwere in the middle of the last century, and maybe that is why I could not build up too much enthusiasm for a visit to Sapori, the High Street’s Italian restaurant. I was expecting the place to reflect the ambience of the road it sat in, an old style Italian restaurant serving lasagne and bolognaise and garlic bread on checkered red table clothes.

I was wrong; expectations were totally confounded and the meal I had, in this white walled, white table clothed, airy restaturant was an absolute joy.

My starter was an absolute killer of a dish. It was thinly sliced veal, served with roquette leaves and parmesan with a lemon dressing. I asked the owner (I think it was the owner) about it and he talked with enthusiasm about Carpaccio dishes and his enthusiasm belied someone who cared deeply about food. (I’ll write about what he said in another blog entry).

My main course was Tagliate di manzo (Beef sirloin, ‘tagliate’ style with rocket leaves, parmesan, sun dried tomatoes and honey and balsamic dressing, with roasted potatoes). Ordered rare, it was a delightful dish – the combination of rare steak with the fuller flavoured salad leaves works so brilliantly together. So well in fact that I wish that I had asked for it without the balsamic dressing as this may have slightly taken the edge off the combined flavour of the meat and the rocket.

However, despite the fact that my first two courses were nigh on perfect – the way I usually end up judging a restaurant is by its cheese board (if it has one). A lazily assembled cheese board makes me cross because these days very decent cheese is not hard to come by.

Obviously this is a quirk on my part, if I could I would only eat cheese until my dying day, (which, if I followed that diet, would be in about August 2012). But the cheese board at Sapori proved my theory that a decent cheese board means a decent restaurant. They had really made the effort and by putting some thought into it and they have come up with an Italian cheese board that surpassed almost any I have had before in a restaurant.

5 cheeses were served. Dolcelatte, a decent enough Fontina, Pecorino ( a nice change after having Parmesan in both my starter and main) , Talegio and a goat’s cheese the name of which I did not get. The cheeses came with a Sardinian bread, which I think is called Pane Carasau and which comes in wafer thin slices, much like popadums. This bread was a perfect accompaniment to the soft cheeses and the bread and the cheese all went perfectly with the Chianti we had been drinking through the meal.

(I asked the waitress about the cheeses and she called the chef over and he identified the cheeses and told me about the bread. Clearly also a man who really cared about the food that the restaurant served)

Both my girlfriend and I had 3 courses and a bottle of wine and the whole meal came to £61. I felt that £30 a head for a meal of that quality was a bit of a bargain (though I am hopeless at estimating the true financial value of things).

After the meal, under dark swollen skies we walked a mile or along the beach to the Osbourne View, a big barn of a pub which has some fantastic views of the Solent and over a pint we wondered whether the best meals usually come with no expectations. That was certainly the case with Sapori. Really excellent.