The Spaghetti Incident – restaurant review

The soothing beats of Italian jazz reverberate off the natural wood paneling that lines the walls of Stokes Croft’s newest food offering.

With no flashy banners or gaudy gimmicks to lure you in, you might miss the grinning orange motorbike-come-spaghetti-mobile signalling that a new Italian restaurant, The Spaghetti Incident, lies inside.

It’s the scattering of green chairs, two tables and an A-board outlining today’s lunchtime special (pasta and a drink for £9.50) that suggest this is indeed a place to dine.

The zucchini and toasted pine nut pizza fritta is both crunchy and soft

Peruse the starters and you’ll mainly find pizza frittas topped with a selection of fresh vegetables (£5) or amatriciana sauce (a spicy blend of tomato, bacon and basil at £6).

There’s also the choice of a fritto misto’ (deepfried seafood at £6) and carciofo alla Romana’, a springtime Italian dish with artichokes.

A pizza fritta topped with zucchini and pine nuts sounds too good to miss and arrived less than ten minutes after ordering, olive oil still sizzling a little from the heat of the dough.

As its namesake suggests, this dish delivers the combined texture of an Italian pizza with the flatbreads of the Middle East, fried and crispy on the outside, yet soft and comforting once you take a bite.

The courgette is shredded and tastes vinegary, a sour twang to counteract the toasted nuts and their sweet crunch. Paprika is sprinkled atop this cultural clash, which would work well on its own if you only had time for something light.

The tomato and basil spaghetti proves flavoursome and filling

The mains are split into two sections, The Romans and The Specials, ranging from carbonara with guanciale eggs (£10) and ravioli stuffed with seafood (£14) to coda alla Vacinara – oxtail braised in a tomato and red wine sauce (£14) – and wild mushroom gnocci (£14).

Spaghetti al Pomodoro (£8) was sweet and uncomplicated. It comes in a large bowl, the spaghetti swathed in a perfectly balanced sauce, elementary in form but packed full of punch. Basil leaves deliver peppery interludes and the pasta itself shines through with every bite, fresh and cooked to al dente precision.

For dessert, the ‘tiramisu factory’ features a choice of regular, strawberry, pistachio and amaretto flavours to choose from; with Italian coffee served short with optional sugar is the final touch at this restaurant that was previously Dub Lounge and most recently Raffyz.

If The Spaghetti Junction’s own lunchtime offer isn’t enough to bring you in, then Wriggle is already on it, with a flash sale of their pasta mains for just a fiver.

In an age where anybody can boil a bag of penne from the corner shop, sprinkle it with cheese and call it pasta, the prospect of heading out to eat something so quick and basic might at first seem futile.

But that’s the beauty of Italian cuisine; its simplicity dupes you into thinking you could whip up something on par, until you’re sat in a restaurant like The Spaghetti Incident, tucking into a bowl of something you know you could never imitate.

The Spaghetti Incident, 36 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3QD
0117 330 1401

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