Sorella: Robin Gill and Dean Parker’s ode to Italy

‘I’d always wanted to open an Italian restaurant ever since my time in Italy,’ he tells me. ‘We were originally looking at a site in Covent Garden and had a concept, menus and everything ready to go but then Brexit happened and we got really nervous. A year passed and we still really wanted to do it, so we decided that after three fantastic years it was time to close The Manor – which was perhaps a little too similar to The Dairy – and open Sorella.’

Robin and Dean had always worked very closely together and it was clear from the beginning that Sorella would be Dean’s restaurant once The Manor had closed. But to get Dean to fall in love with Italian cooking in the same way Robin did, a trip to Italy was in order. So they hopped on a plane and spent a few weeks working on the Amalfi Coast. ‘It was amazing,’ says Dean. ‘The trattoria I worked in was right on the coast and every day this Italian granny would pick stuff from her garden and bring it into the restaurant. I was fully convinced that Sorella was the way forward.’

A focus on Italian cooking might make you think there’s little opportunity to create the ferments that formed a large part of The Manor’s menu. But the Italians are actually a dab hand at preserving. ‘We had a lot of ferments going on at The Manor and we’ve managed to keep that at Sorella because the Italians do so much preserving as well,’ says Dean. ‘We create things like our own fermented fennel and charcuterie at the moment, but there’s so much more – colatura (a traditional anchovy sauce), bottarga, preserved lemons, giardiniera – that we can play around with in the future. We’ve always done a pork and fennel salami at The Dairy and The Manor, but now we’re making a really peppery coppa as well. Bread is a massive thing for us too; even though sourdough doesn’t appear that much in Italian cooking it’s something we’re focusing on, and because our bread is so soft and has a high moisture content you don’t really need butter with it, so we serve olive oil instead.’

It’s clear Dean loves working with dough, be it bread or pasta, as much as he loves preserving. ‘Dough is so nice to work with because it can change throughout the day – although that does keep you on your toes,’ he says. ‘We use Gilchesters Organics flour which is incredible as it imparts this really nutty flavour into the pasta which you just don’t get with the traditional Italian 00 flour. The gluten content can vary from bag to bag, though, so you have to think a little bit more when you’re working with it.’

There are other little things which make Dean’s take on Italian cooking unique. House-made miso in the bread; venison with cavolo nero and bay leaf panna cotta are things you wouldn’t necessarily see in a traditional trattoria in the Old Country. But that’s what makes Sorella such a popular restaurant. Like Bæst in Copenhagen, which is famous for its sourdough pizzas, Sorella cooks Italian cuisine with a distinctly modern twist.

‘Italians can be very traditional, and we’ve had some people watch us put sliced fennel with linguine and wondered what on earth we’re doing,’ says Dean. ‘But purists and traditionalists are never going to like anything that strays from the classics. Just as many Italians have been in and think what we’re doing is amazing.’

This way of cooking – combining Italian dishes with a modern British and even slightly Nordic twist – is the key to Sorella’s success. But the way the menu is divided up is distinctly Italian, with dishes to be shared by the table and antipasti to nibble on before the primi (starters) secondi (mains) and dolci (desserts). ‘That’s what I love about Italian food – the style of eating,’ says Robin. ‘It’s all very family-orientated and everything is shared. Italian dishes also go so well with wine, whereas – and I know I could get slagged off for this – I find I can’t drink red wine with cuisines like Indian or Chinese. The synergy between Italian cuisine and wine is hundreds of years old, and it makes it such an enjoyable thing to experience.’

The primi pasta courses at Sorella change depending on what vegetables the team get in every week, but there’s almost always some form of gnocchi, tagliatelle and linguine on the menu. Antipasti and cicchetti (snacks) include things like truffle arancini, fried olives and Dean’s own charcuterie, but the secondi are where the kitchen team seems to have the most fun.

‘In Italy lots of the secondi are cooked over fire, which is something we’re doing a lot at Sorella,’ explains Dean. ‘We get whole cows in, which means we can hang big cuts of meat like sirloin over our ceramic grill and let it gently smoke and cook until it gets up to 52°C. Then we can just carve pieces off it as we go through service instead of cooking individual portions, which is a really nice way of working.’

Another reason Robin was so keen to open Sorella was the fact that he’d started working with Indie Ecology, a forward-thinking farm project run by Igor Vaintraub. When Robin was working at Don Alfonso in Italy, the restaurant revolved around the owner’s farm, which would arrive every morning and dictate what was on the menu. Robin wanted to do something similar in Clapham.

‘I got an email from Brett Graham at The Ledbury who put us in contact with Igor as they’d been working together for a few years,’ explains Robin. ‘We’d been using suppliers like Namayasai and Natoora who are great, but to have our own plot on a farm was next level. It’s a bit of an investment – in our first year we didn’t get the quantity of produce we wanted – but we’re sticking with him and it’s getting better and better every year. The ingredients we do get from Igor are incredible, and the fact that he’s taking farm land which isn’t necessarily great for growing on and breathing new life into it is really important.’