The pasta pop-up that spent eight months in the back of a Walthamstow Village wine shop is not going anywhere. Macchina has reopened at Hometipple, 34 Orford Road, as a permanent restaurant with room for 60.
The change follows a refurbishment in August. Until then, head chef Hayley Meredith had been running Macchina as a residency at the wine shop and bar; now it has the space, and the fittings, to stay.
Meredith grew up in Staffordshire and learned to cook in her grandmother's kitchen. Before Macchina she spent eight years running Pasta Slut, taking it through residencies in London and Bristol and at the George & Heart boutique hotel in Margate.
The name is a small joke that turns out to be a mission statement. "Macchina" translates directly as "car", Meredith explains, but it can also be used to describe a person as "like a machine - which you have to be to survive and thrive in hospitality".
What she wants from the room is something gentler than that. "The kind of restaurant where you can come for a long lunch, stay for another bottle, eat really good food and feel properly looked after," she says.
The cooking is Sicilian-inspired and pasta-led. Writing in the Leytonstoner, Stephen Emms describes an interior that plays with 1990s Italian design, candle-lit and rather glamorous for a shopfront on Orford Road.
Macchina can be found at @macchinalondon, and Hometipple at @hometipple.e17.
