Vieni, Birmingham – ‘A happy hubbub – you cannot pipe this in’ – restaurant review

Vieni, an Italian restaurant in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham, is small, Sicilian and scrappy. The Instagram bio of its chef and founder Angelina Adamo reads, “Bite off more than you can chew and learn how to fucking chew”, which feels like a battle cry for almost everyone stepping into hospitality, especially independent places like Vieni, where the waters are choppy and your skillset needs to be varied. Arancini with one hand, signing off payroll and ordering loo paper with the other.

Vieni, which is about a mile or so from the city’s Bull Ring, is a million miles from Albert’s Schloss, Big Mamma’s La Bellezza and the multitude of vast, impersonal pleasure machines that have spread their legs in Brum city centre. Of course, a gigantic Rosa’s serving pad thai and Tattu with a plastic purple flower ceiling all have their place, and make people happy, but I have joy in my heart for places like Vieni.

‘Hearty, not trendy’: Vieni’s barbecued whole sea bass, with courgette and basil

Prior to this opening, Adamo was running the kitchen at The Circle Lounge inside Birmingham Hippodrome, serving weary thesps and parents seeking refuge from Robin Hood the pantomime, with plates of marvellous arancini. She has now moved to this tiny, beloved nook on the edge of the newly emerging Goodsyard development, serving coils of Sicilian fennel sausage with cacio e pepe butter beans, fregola with clams, and an eccentric, ever-changing dolce of the day that is worth the train fare alone. Note: many property developers claim to be building in the quaintly named Jewellery Quarter but are actually miles away; Vieni is just beside the tiny station. En route I bought vintage clip-on earrings from a man in a bullet-proof kiosk, while on the corner a sandwich board offered gold grills for your teeth from £60, with free moulding and postage.

Vieni’s menu is hearty, not trendy – it’s not glorified picky bits and puzzling sharing plates. It is, instead, 32-hour ox cheek crispy lasagne in slices as a starter; Pyefleet oysters with British strawberry and champagne vinegar; seabass crudo with peaches, basil and green chilli; and ruffled ribbons of mafaldine with vodka tomato sauce. We snuck in on a Saturday at around half past four, myself and the weary Charles, and grabbed a window table for a Sicilian Slapper, draught Poretti and Limonata Radler, and a glass of Luscombe’s lightly sparkling rhubarb pop. Soon we were ordering a round of 1946 gildas and a plate of majoram polenta bites. We’d popped in for snacks; now we were begging them to serve us dinner.

I needed one of the pea, broad bean and pecorino arancini that Adamo is so adept at; these aren’t your piddly quail’s egg-sized arancini so popular in Britain. This was a magnificent object, perched in a puddle of tomato sauce and heaped with pecorino. Next up, that 32-hour ox cheek crispy lasagne: lots of depth, lots of softness. The ultimate cuddle on a plate.

32 Hr Ox Cheek Crispy Lasagn‘An ultimate cuddle on a plate’: Vieni’s 32-hour ox cheek crispy lasagne.

Vieni has that thing that pleases me most in restaurants: a happy hubbub. You cannot pipe this in or orchestrate it. A happy restaurant hubbub manifests when diners are genuinely happy with their s’mores toasted marshmallow gelato, or, as we had, a large barbecued sea bream with peperoncino ’nduja butter. Diners were chuffed with their burrata, melon and Brummie honey, littered with mint and pistachio, or their whole globe artichoke with hazelnut pangrattato. This wasn’t like Kawan, who you may remember from last week, where the atmosphere was of people who had been very politely mugged.

Dolce of the day: Vieni’s Sicilian lemon and vanilla cannolo.

Vieni dances a fine line where British-Italian restaurants often fail. It’s not the Spaghetti House or a red-sauce mum-and-pop restaurant; it sits closer in spirit to Moro on Exmouth Market, London, but it isn’t remotely intimidating and you are actually being fed. The menu is ever changing – that dolce of the day, a s’mores toasted marshmallow gelato when we visited, for example, seems now to be a maraschino cherry gelato with a lattice shortcrust. That’s one of the sexiest things I’ve written this year.

Grab a table. Bite off more than you can chew. Then eat the bloody lot.

• Vieni, 41 Pitsford Street, Goodsyard, B18 6LJ, 0121 806 0080; vieni.co.uk. Open lunch Weds–Sat noon-2pm, dinner Tue-Sat 5pm-9pm, plus brunch Sat 9.30am-11.45am (10am-2pm Sun). About £50 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.