I always appreciate the people who takes time to cook something, anything. Because time makes food better, and sometimes it’s required. I bet MAGARI knows it well.
MAGARI is a small independent shop, located in Wapping Wharf. They have a few tables both inside and outside, a tiny home-scale kitchen which gives constraints to what they can do, hence a limited menu.
Yet, they choose to make handmade pasta every day. You can literally see how they make it from the outside. What attracts me is not only the freshly made pasta, but also their courage to take on this big challenge.
Yesterday, while roaming around in Wapping Wharf, I finally got a chance to try it.
The menu was simple.
I picked ragu and Curry Boy wanted carbonara.
From the menu, I can see MAGARI is using some locally sourced beautiful products, such as Ruby & White sausages and bacon, and cacklebean exquisite eggs. These beauties plus lovely handmade pasta, who can beat you?
But the proof of the pudding is in tasting.
Once I had another ragu at a popular Italian restaurant in Bristol. It hardly had any ragu sauce and no depth in the taste. This time I tried ragu again as I wanted to see if MAGARI was doing any better.
The sauce was enough, but sadly the taste was not delivered. I expected ragu to be rich in meaty flavour since ragu is a meat-based pasta and the meat should be the star!
Disappointed. If you are using a good sausage like Ruby & White, but in the end I can hardly enjoy any of this, then what’s the point?
Luckily, the carbonara was better.
The carbonara was not too heavy and the peppery kick was spot on! Curry Boy and I both liked the carbonara much more than the ragu.
But one more downside surprised us – why used take-away paper box while we were dining in?
In this case, I could not enjoy the presentation; the paper-made utensils impact the dining experience negatively and it produced waste, which both could be avoided.
(From the Google review I could see they had plates! Hopefully it’s just a one-off problem)
Running a restaurant is not easy.
MAGARI, you’re already delivering darn good freshly handmade pasta. Why not take a step further, allow more time for your ragu, and let the ingredients shine?
