UPDATE 16/09/16 - One of our eagle-eyed readers has just called up to let us know that, sadly, despite hundreds of legit TripAdvisor reviews (including two in the last two days), Le Delicatezze di Bruno appears to have closed down some time ago. However, should you be in the Rusholme area, there's a fantastic Turkish supermarket on Anson Road called Venus, which serves cracking kebabs and Diet Coke for only 60p. (Cheers Susan).
IN propositional logic there is such a thing as the argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people"), which is a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it: this is sometimes known as “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong” or even “The entire population of Germany can’t be wrong… twice”. Despite the fact that many European countries have demonstrably been wrong, many times, we still believe in the wisdom of the crowds.
We’ve made the mistake of ignoring the pizza menu...
Why the worry about the human tendency to leap on the nearest bandwagon, even if it is going in the completely wrong direction? Well that well-known organ of common sense and rational thought, TripAdvisor, has consistently placed Bruno’s, a small Italian place near the Etihad stadium, in the top ten restaurants in Manchester; “Food heaven” trills one glowing review, “fabulous” sighs another. I have to confess I’m intrigued – an unreconstructed Italian is one of my favourite types of restaurant, ever since I got serenaded by a Frank Sinatra impersonator with a 10 o'clock shadow and a three-song repertoire in a vine-laden nest of checked tablecloths with a melanzane parmigiana to die for. A visit is therefore a must.
Bruno’s, or Le Delicatezze Di Bruno to give it its full title, is an actually fairly reconstructed Italian in Clayton. There are no vines or checked tablecloths or candles in wine bottles, but light colours and pale leather topped off with a violin. There’s nothing it can do to lighten up the view of Ashton New Road but the atmosphere is quirkily appealing.
I beg your pardon?
Bruno's
In lieu of starters we picked two dishes from the 'Italian tapas' menu, which at £2.50 a pop is astonishingly good value. I can’t think of a single place in town as cheap – and I warm to the place even more. Until the food arrives that is. We’ve made the mistake of ignoring the pizza menu, and my stomach reminds me of the error as cartwheels sail past on the way to other diners.
As for our own plates, the whitebait is described on the menu as 'fried baby fishes', which reminds one disturbingly of eating lots of tiny Nemos - if Nemo had been deep-frozen and then deep-fried. The cryogenic small fry were oddly tangy, the same of which can’t be said of the chicken wings, which appeared with light blackening that belied the rapidity of their production. The wings had been advertised as spicy, but in these specimens tasted about as spicy as if they had once shared a lukewarm bath with a pepper.
Fried baby fishes
The unspicy chicken wings
Perhaps one can’t expect too much from tapas dishes, which are just meant to be small drinking snacks after all. The table next to us ordered a large wooden platter of all sorts of things and en masse they did seem more impressive.
It’s a shame the same can’t be said of the main courses. The lasagne (£6) was roughly the same temperature as the molten core of the sun - the most lava-like element being the Bolognese sauce. The sauce tasted intensely tomatoey but possessed a thin tartness that overwhelmed the rest of the ingredients, weakly seasoned.
Lava-like lasagne The seafood risotto (£7.20, main image) also gave pause, the rice grains swimming in a thin tomato liquid, separated by an oily film. Weirdly, for an Italian restaurant, seasoning was low on the list of priorities, with occasional flashes of salt but absolutely zero pepper – and no shakers on the table. Perhaps the comically large peppermill was coming our way. Nope. On the plus side there was plenty of mussels and enough octopi to start its own chorus line, so the seafood part was right at least.
Tiramisu Finally, just as I’m losing my faith in humankind (or at least the section of humanity who post on TripAdvisor), the tiramasu (£3) arrives. It’s fabulous, smooth and sweet and bitter all at once, with a dense creaminess that makes me glad I only ate a third of that risotto.
The fact is the food at Bruno’s is absolutely fine, it's value for money without question but the TripAdvisor status might have the surprisingly adverse effect of raising expectations too high and that just leads to disappointment. But then that’s just one reviewer’s opinion.
