London’s Most Extra Restaurant Group Attacks Cost of Living Crisis With Caviar, Bottarga, and Truffle

Nah, me neither.

“A divine Italian mansion where the naughtiest fantasies come to life.” This is how London’s most extra restaurant group is describing its extremely over-the-top forthcoming project in Kensington. Big Mamma group of Gloria, Ave Mario, and Circolo Popolare fame/infamy will open Jacuzzi, a four-floor, 4000 square feet, 170-seater “palazzo” with a menu of excessively deployed luxury ingredients, in January next year. It will be the French-owned kitsch “Italian” restaurant group’s fourth London site.

Its opening will come at a time when restaurants and hospitality businesses are closing left, right, and centre, with an industry in the thick of an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, and the aftershocks of crises Brexit and COVID-19. But here we are. Big Mamma’s answer to those precarious economic times:

On the menu will be the finest Culatello di Zibello PDO from Onesto Ghirardi, and delicate pizzette topped with seasonal bests: truffle, caviar, bottarga. Our cheese wheel pasta has had a Renaissance, to a colossal truffle pasta for two with fresh black truffle, truffle cream and parmigiano foam, in a 4kg wheel of pecorino. The palazzo to piatti doesn’t stop there, introducing our first-ever shareable chocolate fondue, made with half a kilo of the best Valrhona chocolate.

And as if by divine intervention, the “basement vault of this 19th century bank” has been converted into what the owners are calling a “disco toilet.”

“Enter the glitter ball to a cove of mirrors to get you feeling like Michelangelo’s David — just peachy,” Big Mamma instructs.

Mamma, ahem, mia!