La Vita, Hurworth, restaurant review of former Otter & Fish
It has even survived the virtual extinction of the animal it was named after, hunted by the nearby Neasham Otterhounds in the polluted River Tees, but which is now rebounding and quite numerous along the banks.
The Otter & Fish has been reborn as La VitaA month ago, however, the traditional English pub name disappeared and the Otter & Fish was reborn as La Vita, an Italian restaurant.
Inside, you’d be hard pressed to see any difference. There are a couple of new pieces of glass with ‘La Vita’ etched on them, but the sculptural wooden ornaments that have been sitting on shelves for years are still in place.
And it is noisy.
We’ve had a couple of letters recently about the noise in pubs and restaurants, and here it was hard for the waiters to hear to take our orders. Not because of over-loud ‘background’ music, but because of so many people talking and enjoying themselves. And that’s because it was so busy.
On Saturday, the earliest table we could get was at 8.15pm and people were coming in after us.
The menu is straightforward and everything you’d expect from an Italian restaurant: garlic bread, garlic mushrooms, prawn cocktail and bruschetta were among the starters, then there’s pizza and pasta for mains, plus a parmo and seabass and some burgers for good measure.
What jumped out of the menu was the prices. It was like Liz Truss and double digit inflation had never happened.
The starters were £5.95 and the main courses began at £10.95 for lasagne, Bolognese and carbonara.
Chicken parmesan and chips was expensive at £15.95, but the parmo van that calls every month down the road in the Hurworth Grange car park costs £14 and you have to go and stand in the rain to collect it.
Our two starters: halloumi, left, and chicken wingsBetween four of us we shared two starters: fried halloumi (£5.95) and four chicken wings in BBQ sauce (£6.95).
The breaded halloumi came with a nice sweet chilli sauce and a little rocket; the chicken wings were hot, fell from the bone, were doused in sauce and even had a little mixed salad. Both were very acceptable, and I thought the halved tomatoes in the BBQ sauce were quite delicious.
For our main courses, Theo, our son, had a margherita pizza for £9.95 (above). It was large and plain, as he likes it, and probably hand-stretched. He ate every morsel of it.
Genevieve, our daughter, had penne al forno (£11.95) (above), which was tubes of pasta with everything thrown at them: chicken, a little chilli, garlic, tomatoes in a creamy tomato sauce with mozzarella melted on top. It all worked surprisingly well, and despite everything that was going on in the dish, she could still sense the slightest heat from the chilli.
Petra, my wife, ordered ratatouille (£10.95) (above). It wasn’t quite the stuffed aubergine the menu promised, as it was more of Mediterranean stew of tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, onions and slices of aubergine. She needed the portion of chips (£3.95) that she had ordered to bulk it into a main dish and to take up some of the richness of the ratatouille, but she enjoyed it.
I was tempted by the hanging chicken kebab (£15.95) which looked enticing as a couple swung by me from the kitchen, but it didn’t feel right to be reviewing an Italian and ordering Turkish.
So I went for the most expensive pasta: La Vita Penne (£15.95) (above), which was garlic buttered steak in a creamy tarragon sauce. The steak was fine, but its gentle meaty taste was a little lost among the loveliness of the creamy, garlic, herby tarragon goings-on of the sauce, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Desserts were all £5.95, except the special kunefe at £7.95 – quite what a Turkish sweet cheese pastry is doing in an authentic Italian is hard to say, but it was the one surprise among the STP, banoffee, brownie, cheesecake, mousse and tiramisu.
Genevieve was concerned there might be peanuts sprinkled on top of the chocolate mousse so instead the kitchen crumbled pistachios on top for her so there was a little granularity to the smoothness of the dish.
I’d chosen ‘Mama’s favourite coffee dessert’, the tiramisu (above), which didn’t really taste of coffee but had an intriguing hint of citrus to go with its light creaminess so it was cold and pleasant.
While Theo surprised us by just wanting a coffee after his pizza, Petra had two scoops of strawberry gelato for £3.50 – you won’t pay any less for two scoops in a paper tub at an ice cream parlour, and this was a real dense, fruity gelato full of strawberry flavour and pips.
Despite the late hour and the busyness of the pub, service was friendly (at least one Italian-sounding accent) and fast.
Our bill came to £102.10 for four for three courses, and that includes a gin and tonic for £7.55.
This isn’t high dining, the food isn’t pushing at any boundaries, and the menu is so straightforward that some might say it’s a little predictable. But it is what people want at the end of a hard week.
The food at La Vita is reassuringly good, with some lovely sauces, and the value must be as high as at any time in the Otter & Fish’s previous two centuries.
La Vita,
1 Strait Lane, Hurworth-on-Tees, DL2 2AH
Tel: 01325 516483
More information on Facebook.
Ratings
Surroundings: 6
Service: 8
Food quality: 7
Value for money: 9