Big Mamma opens Edmondo in the City of London
A Grade II-listed bank near the Bank of England becomes the Franco-Italian group's seventh London restaurant, with grilled steaks instead of pizza.
Edmondo London has opened as Big Mamma's seventh restaurant in the capital, inside a Grade II-listed former bank at 6 Lombard Street in the City.
The Franco-Italian group ran a soft launch from 30 October to 1 November before Tuesday's full opening on 6 November. The site seats more than 200 across a central bar, an open kitchen counter and a main dining room built into the old banking hall, a short walk from the Bank of England.
Big Mamma was founded a decade ago by Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux and now runs more than 35 restaurants across Europe, including Gloria and Circolo Popolare elsewhere in London. Edmondo shares its name with an existing Big Mamma site in Hamburg, but the group says the London version is a different concept, built for the City rather than copied from Germany.
No pizza on this menu: just XL focaccia, grilled steaks and three private rooms built for the City's lunch trade.
The interior draws on Piero Portaluppi's Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, mixing Art Deco panelling with Enzo Ferrari memorabilia on the walls, the same Milanese dining culture AMUSE mapped out table by table this year. Bar manager Ilaria runs a pre- and post-dinner cocktail list from the central counter, in view of the open kitchen.
No pizza on this menu
Head chef Alfonso Esposito has left pizza off the menu entirely, unusual for a Big Mamma opening. In its place: focaccia cut in extra-large sheets, a gnocchi al gorgonzola, and what the group calls its largest selection yet of Italian grilled steaks, cut from beef supplied by Phillip Warren.
Pastry chef Angelina closes the meal with an Italian chocolate cake built around a melting centre and an affogato finished tableside. Both read as a step up from the trattoria desserts at Big Mamma's other London sites.
Three private rooms, a London first
Edmondo is also the first Big Mamma restaurant in London with dedicated private dining. Three rooms named La Libreria, Il Salotto and Il Ridotto seat between 10 and 24 guests each, aimed squarely at the City's lunch and client-dinner trade that Gloria and Circolo Popolare were never built to serve.
It is Big Mamma's eighth UK restaurant, following Barbarella in Canary Wharf last year, and comes as the group plots a first US site in Juno Beach, Florida, with Chicago's Ballyhoo Hospitality. The group has shown the same instinct abroad, turning a long-empty café on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm into a trattoria earlier this year.
Whether Lombard Street's bankers take to communal Milanese dining the way Soho and Shoreditch already have is the real test now that the scaffolding is down.
