The only way is up... to Café Sopra

Stroll into Fratelli Fresh on Danks Street in Waterloo (or indeed, drive in if there are available parking spaces), past the pretty displays of fruit and vegetables, up the very industrial staircase and into the upper level where shelves of pasta compete on variety with bottles of balsamic vinegar and other very Italian ingredients.

If you’re not distracted by the balsamic vinegar tasting station, move towards to the light and noise that should undoubtedly be Café Sopra – haven for lovers of pasta, fresh salads and Saturday lunches it seemed.

Smoked trout fish cake with soft poached egg, caper mayonnaise
from Café Sopra, Danks Street, Waterloo

With a few breakfast options amid the many salad and pasta options, a breakfaster would likely struggle not to order a plate of tagliatelle or a cabbage salad to break the fast.

For our lunch-y brunch, we quibble over who has the trout fish cake – I concede quickly so I get to order my second choice too. The fish cake arrives as a thick golden coin, sprinkled with sea salt and sitting amid watercress and a liberal puddle of yellow caper mayonnaise and higged by two halves of an egg.

The potato and trout filled cake was a little more fishy than I like, suitably offset by the tangy mayonnaise and the bitter-sour flavours of the radicchio side which is dressed in aged balsamic vinegar.

Radicchio with aged balsamic

As for me, I can’t go past the eggplant in the casareccia pasta dish, which actually turns out to be a minor player in the whole thing.

Casareccia with roast eggplant, goat’s cheese, portobello mushrooms, black olives

Long, ‘S’-rolled pasta fills the plate with the perhaps a dash of cream; blobs of white goat’s cheese; a few caramelised, charred bits of eggplant and many hunks of juicy Portobello mushrooms.

Casareccia - perhaps my new favourite pasta

Some cracked black pepper would have been perfect, and while the olives weren’t discernable to the eye or palate, its exclusion wasn’t missed as the pasta dish was pretty close to perfect as it was.

And just the right size too, but unfortunately not leaving any space for dessert and Café Sopra's famous banoffee pie.

We choose not to loiter as the queue to be seated extends into the grocery area. Completely satisfied with the meal, we do the only thing we can after things go up – we head back down to Fratelli Fresh and look forward to heading up again soon.