carbonara Archives - Time for a coffee

January 8, 2024

Truffle & Pancetta Carbonara

I was over in Cambridge doing some work stuff and was looking for a place for lunch. I had another voucher for free main course at Zizzi, having used one recently in Bristol on a rustica pizza.

There are two branches of Zizzi in Cambridge, one on Regent Street, next to Parker’s Piece, the other on Bene’t Street. The Bene’t Street branch use to be a bank, and before that (as in before 1917) a wine merchants. It’s an impressive building with lovely ceilings and decorative walls.

I was given a warm welcome and allowed to choose a table. I looked over the menu and decided that I would have something different to pizza. In the end I chose the Fresh Creste di Gallo pasta with wild mushrooms in a rich pancetta, pecorino & truffle-infused carbonara sauce. I have a thing for wild mushrooms and I do like fresh pasta. I checked that my voucher was valid, having had an issue with my previous experience. All was fine and dandy. No problems there then. Placed my order and waited for my food.

I wasn’t that impressed with the look of the dish, but then again it was fundamentally past in a carbonara sauce.

I did enjoy the pasta dish, but felt it lacked the depth of flavour of mushrooms and truffle I was expecting.

Overall a really pleasant place to eat, good service and nice food.

September 21, 2022September 19, 2022

Disappointing main course

I was attending a team away day at Ashorne Hill Conference Centre and it was time for dinner. As part of my job I will often attend events and conferences. Sometimes these will be in hotels and other times they are in dedicated conference centres. I usually have lunch, which usually defaults to some kind of buffet lunch. For some events and conferences I stay over and that means having dinner.

So there I was attending an “away day” at the Ashorne Hill Conference Centre near to Leamington Spa. It was a lunchtime to lunchtime event, so there was dinner in the evening. For my starter I went with the smoked salmon on a crumpet, with a poached egg and topped with hollandaise sauce and a chive crumb, which was rather nice.

My main course, though was rather disappointing. I had gone with the mushroom pasta carbonara.

Though this was a vegetarian dish, I could quite easily see the mushrooms replacing the pancetta or the guanciale. What I didn’t expect was the pasta, that pasta that was used was pasta shells or conchiglie.

Usually with carbonara, spaghetti is the most common pasta, but fettuccine, rigatoni, linguine, or bucatini are also used.

The garlic bread appeared to be made from naan bread!

The dish just didn’t work for me, it didn’t taste right and I didn’t like it (and I usually like pasta).

In the end I returned the dish and had it replaced it with some pork belly, which was much better.

July 10, 2019

Time for a cheaper pizza

In the past we’ve had some good experiences at the Bella Italia at Cribbs Causeway and we’ve had some pretty poor ones too. We have been there a number of times, and they have revamped the places a few times over the years. Now it has a more of an American diner feel to it, rather than the Italian restaurant style it had before.

One of the key reasons we decided to return to eat was that we had a special offer. We used an offer code, so we only paid five pounds for each dish, which made the whole meal very good value for money.

Though we had to wait for a while, we were once our table was ready we were given a warm and friendly welcome and and it was quick and easy to place our order.

I ordered the Funghi Luganica – A ‘white pizza’ with a mascarpone and porcini base, topped with garlic & thyme chestnut mushrooms, pancetta, Luganica sausage and mozzarella.

I’ve had this pizza before at Bella Italia and I enjoyed it last time, and I enjoyed it this time as well. The base is mushroomy (is that a word) and savoury, over the traditional tomato that you find on most pizza. The chunks of mushroom on the pizza were very nice and I really enjoyed them.

My son had the Queen Margherita pizza. Tomato and mozzarella base, oven-baked then topped with torn bufala mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, toasted pine nuts, rocket and green pesto.

This looked great and he said it was fresh and tasty. It was finished off, which doesn’t always happen.

My wife had the fresh egg tagliatelle in a tasty carbonara sauce with crispy pancetta and leeks.

However this didn’t look anything like the picture on the menu on the website when we got home, where are the leeks? Having said that she did say the pasta was very tasty.

Service was mixed, our main waiter was warm and friendly, but other staff looked rushed and flustered.

Overall though we had an enjoyable dining experience.