Watching over La Pergola hangs a giant portrait of Italian chef Giulio de Simone. Tanned, moustachioed and brandishing a giant knife (naughty children beware!) his smile radiates decades of experience to the diners at this family run restaurant found just south of Cambridge.
When you visit this former pub in Harlton you may not meet Giulio in person as he works in the kitchen.
You might spot him through the kitchen’s glass partition, plunging pizzas into the depths of a giant wood burning oven. You may also encounter his softly spoken son-in-law Domenico, with his neatly trimmed beard, who looks after customers as he glides around the spacious white-walled dining area.
The De Sorrento clan took over in 2007 keeping the bar area open for the locals whilst building up the restaurant side and adding plenty of little reminders of the home country, such straw-bottomed chianti bottles.
Speaking of wine, whilst the wine list is modest, it comes by the carafe as well as full bottles, allowing drinkers to order the amount they actually want.The menu itself features all the usual Italian staples, such as pasta and pizza, along with a slowly increasing range of home-made dishes, including the bread, pickle, a spicy sausage made with fennel, and of late the vegetables and herbs are grown in a plastic polytunnel round the back. La Pergola runs an English-style Sunday Lunch menu at the weekend, so we stopped by on a weekday evening to try out more of the Italian cuisine.
A mixed antipasto starter with Parma ham, coppa and salami warmed our appetites nicely before we tucked into our main courses of the piccante pizza and the ‘Misto Di Carne’, the Italian equivalent of a mixed grill. The sausage proved playfully spicy upon the crispy pizza base whilst the grill satisfied with its endless little chunks of tender meat and baby potatoes. So filling were the dishes that we planned to go easy with dessert, an aim that went awry when the lemon sorbet arrived in a massive sundae glass. Portions here come in one size: large.
La Pergola prices seem reasonable for the cuisine style and quality. No doubt this is why despite occupying a lonely spot the restaurant seems busy particularly on weekend evenings. Although we dined inside, as we left we spied some empty espresso cups lying on a wall in the terracotta brick-lined patio area outside, which seemed just the spot for our next visit.