La Pergola, a former pub (The Wheatsheaf) on the road to Wimpole Hall, is situated on a lonely spot south of Cambridge near to Harlton just as the hills of South Cambridgeshire start to roll upwards from the fens. Totally renovated and reopened in August 2007, the owners were obliged to keep the establishment open as a pub placing it into the unusual category of a restaurant with a pub attached, as opposed to more usual pub that does food.
The restaurant fills a cavernous barn-like structure in white plaster alongside the pub and is dominated by a wood burning pizza oven – into which diners can observe their orders being plunged and then retrieved from the inferno. Complementing this, the dining area is full of little Italian touches such as straw-based wine bottles. On our trip we marvelled at how large the restaurant seemed and at how full it was despite this.
New it may have looked but La Pergola’s menu is old-school Italian based upon the trinity of pizza, pasta and profiteroles! The de Simone family who run La Pergola hail from Sorento in Southern Italy and have been running restaurants around Cambridge for the past forty years, notably the Copper Kettle on King’s Parade. Based around the traditional Italian dining format of Primo, Secondi and Dolci it’s very easy to saunter into La Pergola and inadvertently order a full Italian feast.
Highlights include a few home-made ingredients on the menu, notably bread and sausage. The bread is delicious and dense, an ideal accompaniment to olives. The sausage, made with fennel, is quite spicy and is served on its own as a main or as a pizza topping. Given the prominence of the pizza oven no trip would be complete without trying one. The one we tried was crispy thin pan and quite delicious. On our visit the overall winner was a tasty roasted Sea Bass with an especially flavoursome skin. Watch out though for the high-powered ovens. Certain dishes carried the latent heat capacity of a volcano when deposited on our table.
Clearly a popular destination, La Pergola briefly becomes more English pub than Italian bistro on Sundays when the traditional English Sunday lunch takes over the menu for the afternoon.
A pleasant Italian restaurant in a thoroughly pleasant place La Pergola is worth a visit especially to watch pizza being made.