Fine Dining

What can I say about Zizzi? It was nice. It’s a pizza/pasta place on George Street. What else? How about ‘fine’. How many words is that if I stretch it out? Twenty? Only 480 words left to go. F-I-N-E, 479 and counting.

This is a first for me, because usually the words pour out and, until I get them down on paper, they torment me, going round and round in my head, a vivid stream of tastes, observations and impressions desperate to be heard. While I’m eating I have to jot things down on my napkin; phrases and impressions spurting out of me, like someone with tourette’s.

Not that I forget. While some people might file a good night out by a favourite anecdote, what they were wearing or who they were with, for me it’s always been about food, and what I have to eat.

And I love food with a passion. Some journalists I know would rather eat their neighbour’s toenail clippings than write a food review, but for me it’s the cherry on the icing on the cake.

Put it this way, food obsessives aren’t often lost for words. But that was before I went to Zizzi.

Not that it was bad, mind you. Bad is easy. Resentment and frustration boil away in my head like a poisonous weeping wound, refusing to heal, the memory of terrible food or appalling service imprinted on my mind.

It’s just that I have trouble remembering my meal at Zizzi at all. What I can talk about is the refurbishment. Because Zizzi followed a long line of George Street refurbs and new openings, which don’t seem to make any difference because on George Street, the same people are always eating the same thing whenever I go past, like some sort of suburban Groundhog Day.

Knowing that gimmick-wise they were up against the carousel at Yo Sushi!, world-on-a-pizza at Fire and Stone or celebrity chef spotting at Jamie’s, the result is fun – white tables and chairs, a few purple ones thrown in for good measure to jazz things up, some new booths, open-plan mezzanine levels, new lighting, coloured plates on the wall like Smarties, oh and a book stall/swap thing at the entrance, trying to lull you into a false sense of security that this is a community hub rather than a vast chain. But then again, I have no right to be bitchy about it, because the decor is as ‘fine’, as the food.

We had fresh asparagus for starter, a wonderful seasonal food that I was surprised to find on the menu. But after that it’s blank. Someone had a salad, one of those superhealthy ones with mungbeans and moss or something, to make the hair grow thickly on your chests and your eyes glow in the dark. Upon further investigation I think this was the Insalata Super for £9.25 which included goats cheese, butternut squash, courgette, lentils, broad beans, mint and mixed leaves drizzled with white balsamic and served with ciabatta bread.

I also sampled the aubergine parmigiana (£8.95), aubergine in a rich tomato sauce with mozzarella and Grana Padano, served with a mixed salad, which when done properly is food from the gods, but in this case was nice, but fine.

And maybe we tried the penne della casa (£9.15) – smoked pancetta, chicken with baby spinach, a creamy mushroom sauce, and the £9.25 lasagna. There were no complaints, but neither were there any whoops of excitement or the stomach-rolling moments of ecstasy I usually bore you with.

And apart from that it’s a blank, a scary void that keeps me awake at night, wondering if this is it, whether I’ll remain lost in the purgatory of average restaurant reviews.

Until, like a drowning man seeing a lifeboat, I realised that I’d already written over 600 words, and that there are worse things to say about a place than ‘nice’.

* Zizzi, 59 George Street, Oxford.

01865 202993