I’m guessing from the journey to Liverpool that I was too old for Creamfields at some point between 2003 and 2005. The train is filled with uni students, all dressed as if Ibiza was annexed by JD Sports, drinking buzzballs and talking in that one-pitch monotone that happens when regional dialect gets demolition derby’d. Given the torrential rain there is a worrying lack of wellies, whilst the tents that line the walkways are all two-man Temu jobs that won’t survive tonight, let alone the bank holiday weekend. They have taken the ancient human urge to gather in a field, dance, drink and behave badly and wrapped it in wristbands, branded stages and cashless payment systems. And more so, withholding the point that their raves require PDF’s telling them how to do it, they seem so utterly unbearable. One sneering piggy-faced gremlin calls my wife a stupid bitch for daring to walk past her to the bathroom. I react badly, sadly reminding myself that my barbed tongue has little age restriction. And then, when it couldn’t get much worse, the train terminates some twenty minutes outside of Liverpool because they’d wasted so much time getting on and off the train so slowly. It must be the ketamine. Even the train driver had had enough.
We had left more than enough time to get to Chin-Zano, and now, after the delays and the £25 cab ride, we arrive some twenty minutes late for lunch. The restaurant is large and cavernous, an old garage converted simply to a space where the kitchen sits raised like a DJ and the rest of the tables look up to see them quietly working away. An excellent negroni improves my dreadful mood at that point, and we order slightly less than we intended because we are conscious of the restaurant getting a break and us getting to the planned four cocktail bars before the gig starts at 8pm.
The cooking at Chin-Zano has the pleasing confidence of food that hasn’t spent too long worrying about what it is supposed to be. It calls itself Italian, but this is Italy after a few drinks and a long conversation with the Mediterranean. Frying olives takes away some of the briny notes and replaces it with a meatiness. There are tangles of salsa verde that have made a bedfellow with pesto and a basil mayonnaise that reinforces that further. Really rather nice. Sophie gets a generous slab of chicken milanese, with a kind of caesar salad of bitter leaves and parmesan. It’s big and well cooked, with good quality chicken and a certain generosity to it.
I got a 16” pizza. Of course I did. I thought I regularly had a firm grasp of what sixteen inches looked like, but it’s much, much bigger than that. It’s a good pizza. Decent dough, a touch bready, but stable and crisp at the base. Loads of excellent vodka sauce that has garlic running through its veins, and plenty of crumbly Italian sausage. Sophie thinks it’s too meaty; I don’t. It is generous, punchy and gloriously excessive, which is exactly what a restaurant should be when it has decided that eating out is supposed to be enjoyable. There are no medals for leaving hungry, despite what half of modern gastronomy appears to believe, and I take two slices with me, proud of the attempt with my wife telling me she told me so in my ear.
The bill with two glasses of excellent house wine is £83, which is fair, and the service was delivered with the sort of charm that makes lunch all the more enjoyable. I really liked it, and we both agreed it would be a regular if we were local. It’s a very nice restaurant, with an appealing menu at the correct price point. Exactly as it should be.
8/10
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