Tropea, Harborne, Birmingham: ‘A forward-thinking take on the Italian trattoria’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

No one could ever mistake south-west Birmingham for the Calabrian coast. In any Venn diagram denoting the commonality between the two, there would be very little in that overlapping section in the middle. Or, more precisely, there would perhaps be just the one word: Tropea.

This restaurant in Harborne, named after a sunkissed Italian resort, has made a quiet name for itself over the past few years with its Salizà amaretto sours and provolone arancini to savour at sunset on a charming terrace. Yes, this particular sun terrace may overlook the traffic on the Lordswood Road, but hopefully some of the edges will be blurred after a round of bombardinos.

In his memoir, Richard E Grant writes about the human need to find “a pocketful of happiness” in every single day – a phrase that came to mind on entering Tropea late last month. Suddenly, I was out of all the coldness and gloom, and in a roomful of diners defiantly enjoying themselves with gossip, venison ragu tagliatelle and blackberry daiquiris. “We’ll stay for just a couple of plates,” I told Charles, hedging our collective bets.

‘A delight’: Tropea’s tagliolini with black winter truffle.

Tropea is not one of those high-street Italian restaurants with red velour chairs, spag bol and breaded mushrooms on the à la carte and a framed portrait of Roberto Baggio in the loo. But then, neither is it one of those “fancy Italians”, where you get a squirrel’s portion of tagliolini in a pale sauce, in a pale room, while listening to Sade covers played on panpipes. Instead, Tropea is a forward-thinking take on the Italian trattoria. Chef Kasia Piątkowska trained at University College Birmingham alongside her now business partner, Ben Robinson-Young, and together they have created a welcoming spot that leans heavily on arty, modern Birmingham, complete with a sleek, navy-blue frontage and, inside, bronzes, warm, sunset oranges and flattering soft lighting. Cool, but not overly cool. This is a restaurant where adventurous mums and dads can treat their student kids to a big £20 plate of gnocchi with gorgonzola dolce and confit red onion, or where mixed groups can catch up semi-noisily over grilled octopus and house red; there’s aubergine parmigiana, too, and tiramisu for dessert if you want something more recognisably “Britaly”.

But Tropea is not in the least painfully “big fish small pond” cool. The staff are absurdly friendly, which helped turn our original order of some very good, crunchy cauliflower house pickles, an arancino and a small portion of tagliolini into a full-blown, three-hour lunch. Our plans changed swiftly after the large butternut squash and sage arancino appeared: it was a golden vision, laden with grated provolone and fixed to its spot by a puddle of cheesy butternut sauce. Crunchy, well seasoned, exquisite.

‘A golden vision’: Tropea’s butternut squash arancino.

A portion of rather thickly cut salt-aged beef carpaccio probably did not need the thick, mayo-style sauce ribboned across it, but it was devoured all the same. We were back on firmer footing with the house-made pasta. Tropea does not go wild in its choice of pasta – there were only four on offer, and two of those were gnocchi and fregola – but quality, not quantity, is what’s important here. The fresh, al dente tagliolini with local black winter truffle was a delight, and came in a meaningful parmesan sauce. Soft, hand-rolled pillows of gnocchi in gorgonzola avoided being one-note by the addition of sweet red onions and a scattering of hazelnuts. Piątkowska and her team run a very good kitchen with a delightful menu, and Harborne is very lucky to have them.

From the pasta, we trundled on, admittedly with a few gaps in service, to a whole roast partridge, out of its pear tree and in a red-wine sauce, served on parmesan polenta with buttery chanterelles. The hero dish of lunch, however, was three bronzed, slightly caramelised slabs of delica pumpkin with whipped ricotta, which was exactly how pumpkin ought to be celebrated. It felt wrong to send any of it back to the kitchen, so I took the last piece home in a box and chopped it over salad for an evening snack.

Tropea’s cannoli are ‘obscenely decadent’.

The overall mood that lunchtime was a little sedate, but I’m told more cocktails are drunk and the disco music is turned up of an evening. If that isn’t your thing, try lunch – and do try the tiramisu while you’re about it, too, because it is a wonderful, generous, boozy lump, and easily enough for two.

And please do not be a fool and skimp on the homemade cannoli. Oh, I know what those are, you’ll think – they’re so often a disappointment. But here they are whopping great, crisp, deep-fried tubes stuffed with cream, salted caramel and chocolate sauce, and they are obscenely decadent. Yes, people might say Birmingham lacks a little by way of la dolce vita, but over in Harborne there’s a place where the imaginary sun shines just that bit brighter.

• Tropea 27-33 Lordswood Road, Harborne, Birmingham B17, 0121-427 9777. Open lunch Fri & Sat, noon-3pm; dinner Tues-Sat, 5-11pm (11.30pm Fri & Sat). From about £40 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service