It starts, as so many minor life crises do, with a photo on the internet. The silk handkerchief pasta – technically fazzoletti, those impossibly thin, folded sheets of fresh pasta draped in walnut butter and pooling around a confit egg yolk – is one of those images you encounter once and simply can’t get out of your brain.
Much like a sports car or a Birkin, depending on your persuasions, except with a far more forgiving price tag and a reservation system that won’t require a waitlist. Next thing you know, you’re on the Bancone website booking a table. This is, it turns out, entirely rational behaviour. Not least because that’s what 1 million people have done since the restaurant opened its first location in Covent Garden in 2018. 1 million silk handkerchief pasta dishes served – imagine that.
For the uninitiated, Bancone means “counter” in Italian, and has building one of London’s most beloved pasta empires ever since it first launched in 2018, collecting a Michelin Bib Gourmand along the way. The City is its fifth outpost, and arguably its most natural home. Situated steps from Bank station on Princes Street, it is surrounded by precisely the kind of people who need a reliable, genuinely delicious, absurdly well-priced lunch on demand – and who will, evidently, fill every booth on a Tuesday night like it’s a Friday in peak season.
The vibes
The room is larger than its siblings – with 170 covers, a large bar area, and a 30-cover private dining room. All booth seating and warm light, a proper City-scaled venue that still somehow resists feeling corporate.
There’s an energy here that a brand-new restaurant shouldn’t really have earned yet: the buzz of somewhere that’s already been figured out, the comfortable hum of regulars who haven’t quite become regulars yet but are well on their way. The office crowd has claimed it entirely and they seem delighted with themselves for doing so.
What’s on the menu?
The menu is refreshingly unbothered by spectacle. There’s no misplaced lobster or wagyu just for show. Just a focused, confident lineup of antipasti and pastas that trusts its ingredients to do the work – which they do.
Starters
Our starters were chosen at the insistence of a server with excellent instincts. The burrata is non-negotiable, he informs us, and he is correct. It comes with sourdough that – in keeping with the sports cars reference – is the world-renowned McLaren of vehicles for all that milky excess.
But the true centrepiece is the fried artichoke, served in a bed of romesco sauce and looking every bit the occasion – leaves fanned out like gilded petals, a crown set down to rest against its deep-red upholstery. Having eaten carciofi alla giudea in Rome – birthplace of the dish, no less – and found ourselves unmoved by the overpowering taste of oil, we were prepared to stay diplomatic.
We need not have been. Bancone’s version is, and we will stand by this, better. The romesco is the revelation: bitty and textured, nutty, with a potent roasted red pepper kick – precisely the foil the crisp, crackling artichoke requires. A glorious thing.
Mains
Then the pastas. The silk handkerchief pasta lives up entirely to its own mythology. Wide, thin sheets of fresh fazzoletti, enveloped in walnut butter with shavings of truffle (optional) and a confit egg yolk at its centre, waiting to be broken into and pulled through the sauce. The kind of dish where you find yourself, about halfway through, already resenting the fact that it will end. At this point we are entirely unable to consider ordering a pasta without an egg yolk in the middle.
The second pasta course we ordered – and here we must pause for a moment of genuine civic pride – is the cacio e pepe. We have eaten cacio e pepe in Rome. We have eaten it all over London. We had waved the white flag, making peace with the idea that the versions in those picturesque trattorie off Piazza Navona would remain the benchmark, unreachable in this postcode.
Bancone’s bucatini – the thick, post-holiday version of spaghetti – wound through a glossy, creamy sauce, finished with black pepper deployed with actual conviction. A heavy hand in the kitchen that isn’t afraid of the spice. This is the closest London has come, by some distance. It takes the title.
Desserts and drinks
The compact dessert list is conspicuously tiramisu-free, which lands as both a relief and a mild existential puzzle for an Italian restaurant. We ordered a pistachio cannoli with a dense, intensely nutty filling inside snapping pastry, and a dark chocolate tart – bittersweet, somehow both scoopable and structured. Neither will be the thing you text someone about – but they respectfully let the starters and main shine.
Lest we not forget the negronis – a short, well-considered list of Signature Bancone negronis all at £7. That’s seven pounds for you. For a negroni, in the City of London, in 2026, when a Diet Coke will set you back not much less. How can you not?
The verdict
Bancone City doesn’t arrive with the tentative energy of a new opening still finding its feet. It’s confident and fully formed. And the secret, if there is one, is that somebody in that kitchen cooks like they mean it. This is the kind of kitchen that cranks the pepper mill without flinching, builds a romesco that bites back, and sees absolutely no reason to hide behind a lobster bisque. This is Italian food that backs itself, and London needs as much of it as it can get.
Key details
Address: 7 Princes Street, London, EC2R 8AQ
Website: bancone.co.uk/city
Socials: @bancone.pasta
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