Amico Bio crafts great healthy dishes with love, served alongside ethical wine. Prices are not excessive, the atmosphere is peaceful and the food on offer stands the chance of turning a confused meat eater into a new vegetarian.

The Venue
To open a vegetarian restaurant a stone’s throw away from the famous Smithfield Market may seem an ironic coincidence and yet, tucked away in the cobbled and pedestrian-only Cloth Fair, Amico Bio fits in better than any meat-heavy establishment. The restaurant has large windows overlooking the beautifully serene yard of St. Bartholomew Church and, combined with the old houses and cobblestone streets, it’s more like a small village than Central London.

Inside the restaurant, there are a couple of rooms painted ivory and furnished with uncomplicated wooden chairs and tables that match the wooden floor. Against two walls there are tall bookshelves with organic products for sale; many are used in the menu so you have an excellent opportunity to try before you buy. The unpretentious decor is reminiscent of a hearty Italian trattoria with just enough British touches to make the venue familiar to Londoners. A few old prints nod to the family bonds behind this green venture.

The Atmosphere
Amico Bio literally means organic friend in Italian and, while the name fits well, the service is beautifully polite and helpful rather than over-familiar. The music is nice and mellow and, although there’s a noisy espresso machine often in use, there is composure and measure at all times. The crowd seems totally random as Amico Bio defies all the rules on who’s meant to eat at a vegetarian restaurant. Expect random vegetarians to come in for dinner and bring some friends, older white-haired couples, the City worker with a conscience introducing the girlfriend to the parents, colleagues united in a life-long abstinence from meat – but not from wine – and everyone else in between.

The Food
There is much to be said about the food at Amico Bio, starting from the fact that the family running the restaurant also runs the organic farm in Italy from where all the fresh produce comes from. The Amicos – this happy surname is behind the restaurant name – deliver from Italy once a week and there is full traceability for everything. Their ethos is pretty hardcore: everything is organic and vegetarian and the cuisine is traditional Italian without ever straying into fusion. The menu is structured as it would be in Italy, with multiple courses: nibbles (£2 - £3.50), starters (£4.50), first course (£6.50), second course (£6.50 - £8), sides (£2.50) and dessert (£5).

Start off with the homemade focaccia bread, scales of Grana Padano cheese, Gaeta olives and organic extra virgin olive oil. At £3 it’s great value for money and unites an exceptionally good olive oil with tasty, soft focaccia – made fresh in the kitchen like all the bread, pasta and ice cream served here – and quality olives, which have a divinely strong flavour. An alternative is the good bruschetta with cherry tomatoes and basil (£3.50), nicely served on a wooden tray. The tomatoes are tasty and the clearly organic basil, with its strong flavour, is wonderfully superior to anything that British supermarkets have to offer. The bread, though, is a bit too charred and the burnt bits affect the taste.

The orange, fennel and red radish salad(£4.50) tastes like it’s doing you a lot of good, packed with vitamins you don’t normally get as well as intriguing flavours. Italian fennel is gifted with a permeating but subtle flavour which is hard to pinpoint, vaguely reminiscent of aniseed. Mixed with the red radish it makes for an almost too pure dish but the orange comes in as a saving grace, coating everything as part of a very good dressing, lifting everything else with its sweet citrus hints and making up for the lack of foliage and tomatoes. After the first mouthful, you will be left asking for more. The wholemeal rice salad (£4.50), on the other hand, sounds bland and uninteresting at first but the actual dish is packed with diced carrots, chopped tomatoes, slices of fennel, olives, red radish and more. The rice is slightly tough but once again this dish has a pure, healthy, uncompromising appeal you are likely to surrender to if you appreciate clean, unadulterated food.

The first course can be pasta, rice or soup. The grass peas ravioli with vegetable ragout (£6.50) are sweet and light. The homemade pasta has a slightly different texture from what we are all used to but its coarseness is a good juxtaposition to the pleasantly healthy taste of unusual grass peas (known as cicerchie in Italian). The tagliatelle with seitan ragout (£7) introduces one of the fortes of Amico Bio. Seitan is a natural meat substitute made of wheat gluten which is fibrous in consistency, rich in proteins but pure in production. The dish, served burning hot, mixes tagliatelle pasta – cooked al dente, to Italian standard – with an understated tomato sauce. Although the seitan does not shine through the tomato sauce has a great simple flavour.

To better taste this new ingredient you can pick a second course, usually meant to be meat or fish but here chosen according to a more compassionate philosophy. The pan-fried seitan with peas and broad beans (£8) is definitely worth trying. Peas and broad beans, dressed with a light stock, have a clear, lively quality: fresh, not mushy, with bite to the beans and shoots coming out of the amazingly fat peas. The seitan is substantial but not too heavy – it is definitely a good idea to introduce meat eaters to vegetarian cuisine with this dish. The seitan and vegetable kebabs with rocket pesto dip (£7.50) sounds like a good idea but in reality is slightly different than you’d expect. The wholemeal wrap is grilled and though the charred lines are a nice touch visually, the burnt flavour is once again overpowering and the wrap itself becomes rather leathery in the process. The filling, by itself delicate but distinct with its mixture of broccoli, carrots and much more, becomes bland in comparison and the slabs of seitan are lost in the mixture.

The desserts stray from the rigorous healthy theme so leave some space for indulgence. The rum baba, with amarene bitter cherries (£5), is a spongy cake with a distinctive shape soaked in rum and served cold as is traditional. The healthy baked apple (£5), instead, is made slightly naughty thanks to a red wine reduction with no sugar but raisins at the bottom.

The Drink
Freshly squeezed, unpretentious juices (¬£2.50 - £3.50) are available, including a striking beetroot juice, which is sweet, fairly light and much more enjoyable than you would think. However, the drink list is dominated by wine, exclusively organic, certified vegetarian or even vegan (wine is often made using animal-derived ingredients to assist processes like purification or filtration) and hailing from Italy. Starting from only £12.50 per bottle or £3.50 per 175ml glass, it’s a great bargain. The Falanghina Taburni Domus has elusive notes, with a tiny bit of melon, and although it’s slightly acidic it’s also vibrant and not too dry. The Terre Di Chieti Perlage 2008 is a nice, well balanced alternative to Pinot Grigio.

The Last Word
The food at Amico Bio is fully organic, packed to capacity with nutrients and prepared only with fresh ingredients – and very affordable.

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