Trullo

Trullo has been a neighbourhood restaurant for long enough that the neighbourhood has changed around it. The restaurant has not. Tim Siadatan opened it with a deliberately narrow brief — proper, seasonal Italian cooking for a genuine local audience — and more than a decade of Highbury turning increasingly upmarket around it hasn’t pushed the kitchen toward anything flashier than that original idea.

The Room

One ground-floor room with a mezzanine upstairs, yellow walls, dark wood, warm lighting. It’s a comfortable, unhurried space rather than a striking one, which suits a restaurant built to be visited often rather than once for the novelty of it. The mezzanine in particular has a slightly quieter, more private feel than the ground floor, and it’s worth requesting specifically if the plan is a longer, more conversational dinner rather than a quick weeknight meal.

Nothing about the fit-out has been substantially altered since opening, and that lack of a redesign is itself a small but telling signal about how the restaurant thinks about its own identity — the room was considered right the first time, and there’s been no commercial pressure since to chase a more fashionable look.

St Paul’s Road has gentrified considerably around it, but the dining room itself hasn’t tried to keep pace. Booking ahead is sensible on weekends, though the restaurant has always kept a handful of tables aside for walk-ins, a detail regulars particularly appreciate given how difficult same-day tables have become at some of Highbury’s newer, more Instagram-friendly openings.

What to Order

Pappardelle with a nine-hour shin of beef ragu, short rib, fish on the bone, and an olive-oil cake to finish. The ragu in particular is the dish regulars measure every subsequent visit against, and it’s worth ordering even for someone who’s had it here a dozen times before.

The short rib is the better choice for a table wanting a heartier main after the pasta course rather than treating the ragu as the whole meal, and the fish on the bone changes with the season and the day’s delivery, which is worth asking about specifically rather than assuming a fixed preparation.

The olive-oil cake at the end is deceptively simple — dense, moist, barely sweetened — and it works precisely because it doesn’t try to compete with everything that’s come before it on a table that’s already eaten well. A starter of cured meats or a simple salad is worth ordering to open the meal, mainly because the pace of the kitchen rewards a slower build toward the pasta course rather than rushing straight to the main event.

The Drinks List

Almost entirely Italian, generous by the glass, chosen to complement a menu built around slow-cooked, produce-forward dishes rather than to impress on its own terms.

What You Will Pay

Dinner for two with pasta each, a shared main, pudding and a bottle: around £140. Sunday lunch set menu: £40 per head, genuinely good value for cooking this considered.

The Verdict

If you live in Islington, Trullo is a local treasure, not an occasion restaurant — and treating it as a regular fixture rather than saving it for a special night is exactly the right instinct.

What’s Being Said

Nine hours in the oven for a ragu that most places would rush in three — the patience is what actually makes it a neighbourhood favourite, not a novelty. That kind of unhurried cooking, repeated night after night for a mostly local crowd, is harder to sustain than a single showpiece dish for a one-off visit.

Restaurants built primarily around impressing first-time visitors tend to drift toward whatever photographs well; Trullo has stayed built around the diner who’s coming back next month, and every decision in the room reflects that — no menu redesigns chasing a trend, no seasonal gimmick dishes added purely to generate attention.

It’s a harder discipline to hold than it looks from the outside, and the fact that regulars can order the same ragu today that they ordered five years ago, cooked exactly as carefully, is the clearest evidence the kitchen has actually managed it. This review’s 4-star rating is a genuine “very good, reliably” mark rather than a ceiling — Trullo has never chased the fifth star, and that’s clearly a deliberate choice rather than a shortfall.