Vines Alive

Compagno and the Hearth 

The late Latin word for companion was engendered via con (together/with) and panis (bread). Your friends were those you broke bread with. Those you shared resources with. Friendship has always been intertwined with food, and language has always echoed this fact. Communities are strengthened around a shared fireplace, around the cooking hearth. 

In Ancient Greek culture, Hestia was the goddess of the hearth, and thus held a prized position in the pantheon. The Greeks deified the hearth as a sacred space within the home – that central place of warmth and nourishment where a family would share meals and stories. Swearing upon Hestia was like swearing upon your relatives. The Greeks saw the public space as an extenuation of the domestic, and the symbolism of the hearth found its twin in the village, town, or city centre. This communal hearth was no less sacred, representing the familial camaraderie between all the inhabitants. Here too, families shared both nourishment and news. Community is companionship. 

Another illustration of this is found in Medieval Europe’s ‘perpetual stew’: a cauldron in either an inn, house, or village-hall, perpetually cooking on a hearth. Everyone would add what they could to the stew, meshing flavours and offerings over time, the contents of which were constantly shared out to all who belonged to the hearth. The cauldron was always cooking. Travellers and hunters might find themselves in need of shelter and food, slumping down on wooden stools by the fire and, well, stew and bread were always warm and ready. 

The hearth is the first point of welcome to strangers. Offering a meal is the first notion of communal warmth. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the hearth space in Ancient Greece was essential to asylum, supplication, treaties and general hospitality. The ancient root for ‘host’ in Greek held a twin meaning with the strangers you entertained. Xenia meant both ‘host’ and ‘guest’ – so powerful were the rules of breaking bread. You offered the hearth to your guest; they would do the same as host. You were ordered to make each other equal, being humble as both taker and provider. Bad hosts and bad guests were therefore cursed in mythology. The ultimate loss of one’s selfhood in those days was exile: to belong to nowhere. Security, warmth, protection, trust, and food all coalesced. There was a human experience at play, one we slowly seem to be losing in modern times.   

Food, Wine, and Company 

In a city of almost 10 million people, there are infinitely more strangers than friends. People are so nameless and numberless that they become abstracted into one massive crowd. People eat at desks, on trains, on benches, all with headphones in. Your Spotify podcast becomes your host. The poignant truth is that food has been isolated as nourishment – something to do in your break before your next meeting. Consider how amazing it feels when dining with friends and family, pulling the cork on a gorgeous red or two. Those Friday nights are moments of catch-up so fulfilling you wonder why you spend so much time eating alone. 

In London’s top-end culinary culture it seems that all the heart and soul is reserved for the cooking itself. Cold seriousness displaces the warmth of the dish you ordered. A man can throw salt on a steak and charge the earth for it. People crave the exclusive. Ironically that literally means they pursue a loneliness disguised as elitism. 

Food has become oddly complex, marketed into indecipherability. A vegetable is shrouded in adjectives until it is unrecognisable on the menu. The story of a dish is enough to demand an embarrassing price tag. Your friends share this expensive table with you, yet you ignore all those who dine around you. You all write the same hashtag on the dinner-post afterwards though. We forget the simple trinity of: good food, good wine and good company.

Dining at Vitis Vivendum 

The Vitis Vivendum dining experience is in every way less guarded, more communal, and simpler than our London counterparts. We have tried to replicate that warmth, conversation and companionship that have defined millennia of bread breaking. A classic evening finds you stepping around the countless others nestled on our low, closely placed tables, overflowing with charcuterie, cheeses, Italian vegetables, pastas, sugar-soaked deserts, and of course: bottles of wine. You cannot help but share some conversation with your neighbours, sometimes even glasses… bottles even. London can be lonely, but 70 Gloucester Road never is. 

We may not have a medieval perpetual stew, but we can promise a constant quality of hearty dishes aimed at warming any weary traveller. This we match with wines which will take you off the streets of rainy London and into the mists of Langhe, the sandy-sun of Sicily, the Valencian air of Alicante, the woodland verdurousness of Burgundy or vine-valleys of Champagne. This winter especially, we beat the cold and wet with our set truffle menu and Piedmontese wine-pairings. 

Should you want to commandeer more space, or simply replicate the Vitis Vivendum hearth-like dining experience for more of your family and friends, we offer a private dining underground space, bookable now! Personalise your evening with menu and wine choices in advance. You can now find our service packages on our website, catering to a minimum of 8 people. 

In this candlelit room, we continue our compagno philosophy of always offering another seat to the same table. In this case, seat yourselves around our Arthurian oak table, ensconced between Burgundy-red walls, a moody Caravaggio scene and of course, some of our magnums. Allow us to host you in that timeless manner – that which has literally defined the vocabulary of friendship and guest-entertaining. Bring these long-standing human experiences back into your life. 

Our Kitchen 

Readers of the Vitis Wine Blog will know that we valorise those producers who let the ground and grapes speak for themselves, preserving tradition and the land as they do so. In an industry of marketed madness, with producers who have become giants, armed with complexity, we spotlight the winemakers who embrace the simplicity of good land, good grapes and good wine. 

It is no surprise that we want our dishes to speak for themselves too. No chef can make a meal delicious with the wrong ingredients, and many of our locals have probably heard us say that at Vitis: ‘we eat ingredients’. Our philosophy begins with this first step, taking extra care when choosing what will constitute our kitchen. 

Final flavours are determined by primary factors. Quality need not be complicated, and we do not endeavour to obfuscate what we offer. This is rustic, wholesome, and hearty food, Osteria style, and most importantly: honest. Despite what London would have you believe, food does not need to be complex. If you truly need to season your dishes with dense and intricate marketing, then you’re afraid to sell what is simple. 

Quality ingredients are also sustainable, and we don’t try and lay claim to annual offerings when mother nature refuses to bend. You simply cannot promise quality tomatoes, for example, in January. The Vitis Vivendum selection is a seasonal menu, hence why our set truffle menu is currently under the spotlight. At Vitis, we eat which ingredients are of the finest quality at a given time, and we pair them with honest wines – our philosophy doesn’t get much simpler than that. 

So, if you personally feel that a sense of togetherness is missing from your mealtimes, remember that it never gets lonely on 70 Gloucester Road...

Ci vediamo presto!

Giancarlo Tocci and Julian Kitsz