Three London-based chefs come to Italy to cook with local ingredients. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, though it does sound like the opening of a joke, and I still haven’t worked out who’s supposed to tell it: the ones who came to cook, or the ones who welcomed them. In fact, it’s a pretty accurate summary of the Italian tour undertaken by Four Legs, who set off from London with their signature dish in tow – the Dexter cheeseburger – and plans to cook at three independent restaurants, only to find themselves making corzetti, hunting down gas canisters in a torrential downpour and drinking Jameson with a Roman kitchen brigade. Along the way, there was a late-night horsemeat sandwich from a Milanese street-food kiosk – the sort of thing that’s practically impossible to find in the UK – and everything else that can happen when you end up cooking in someone else’s kitchen.
The three are Ed McIlroy, Josh Swinney and Cammy Cochrane, the London-based collective known as Four Legs. The story began in 2019 with a residency at the Compton Arms, a London pub, and eventually led to The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park exactly five years ago: “celebrates the history of pubs in London as well as the rapidly growing culinary scene in the city,” as they put it. Not exactly the kind of place that relies on passers-by chasing the latest big thing, but one built around its neighbourhood and the people who live there, with a distinct identity and a cheeseburger that has become its signature dish. A fixture of North London’s food scene, as Time Out London has noted, The Plimsoll was even named Gastropub of the Year 2026 by OpenTable. Meanwhile, the crew has grown to include Tollingtons Fishbar, whose core business needs no explanation, and Bar Etna, apparently turning out some seriously good Philadelphia-style pizza. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but we’re happy to trust the praise making its way around the internet.
Alongside running all these places, the Four Legs are always looking for an excuse to cook elsewhere or invite friends into their own kitchens. On one such trip, in early 2026, they meet Vic Small, one half of Commestibile, at a wine fair in the Jura. The other half is Roberta Abate, and together they run a newsletter and a consultancy. They start talking about the things they get up to around the world and, somewhere along the way, the idea of an Italian tour begins to take shape. “The opportunity to cook in different cities in a country where food is so important was too good to pass up,” they explain. Commestibile helps turn the conversation into an actual project: working with Italian ingredients in front of an audience that has never tasted their food, meeting new people and, while they’re at it, documenting a trip abroad for the first time, with the idea of turning the footage into a video for YouTube. On paper, the plan sounds simple enough: three cities, three independent restaurants, three kitchens to work alongside, ingredients to get to know and menus to put together without being entirely in control of the situation.
At this point, you might expect to find the usual big names on the list. In this business, hype breeds hype. Instead, the pins on the map point to a wine/cocktail bar with a kitchen in Milan, an osteria with an little store in Sestri Levante (GE), and a snack bar in Rome: Minerale, L’Articiocca and Vetro, respectively. Three places with little in common, apart from a certain allergy to cookie-cutter dining and a shared desire to build a relationship with the people who walk through the door. The reason behind the choice goes back to the Four Legs’ own story. The Plimsoll isn’t in Soho or Shoreditch, but in Finsbury Park, a neighbourhood where a restaurant has to earn the trust of the people around it – and keep earning it.
We think without regulars restaurants become purely a transactional service. We get to see the same faces come through our doors week in week out in London and we found a similar situation in the restaurants we cooked in, friends of owners coming in to eat a completely foreign menu, trusting their beloved locals to deliver something of the quality they’re used to. That’s the beauty of owning a restaurant.
At the beginning of October, the tour finally got underway, with one ground rule: to bring their own distinctive style of cooking into places that weren’t theirs, without turning them into the backdrop for a London takeover.
A Milanese Sunday roast
They arrive in Milan at night and, before they’ve even set foot in a kitchen, the Four Legs find themselves at a street-food kiosk selling horsemeat sandwiches. It’s the kind of detour that’s every bit as worthwhile as a guided tour: in Italy, food has its own geography, one that reveals itself even in the small hours, among illuminated signs, warm bread and ingredients that would be hard to find elsewhere. A great start, they say. The following day, they were due at Minerale, in Porta Genova, whose Friends of Friends series brings like-minded people together around food, wine and hospitality. For the occasion, the team had decided to try something they’d never done before: Sunday lunch.
The starting point was the British Sunday roast, the traditional Sunday lunch, reimagined as a chance to bring the Four Legs’ famous Dexter cheeseburger to the table. Beyond that, both sides had free rein, and the day brought a welcome spell of sunshine that was far from guaranteed. Minerale served natural wines and a Bloody Mary created especially for the occasion, made with horseradish-infused gin; the Four Legs brought their own approach to cooking and a burger that, judging by those who tried it, needed little introduction.
“The real surprise was discovering that Sunday lunch actually works at Minerale,” the team says, with the caution of people who have just stumbled upon a possibility and aren’t yet sure whether to credit the sunshine, the London-based chefs or some combination of the two. Whether Sunday lunch will make a comeback or remain a one-off is still up in the air. For one Sunday, though, Milan had its own take on the Sunday roast, while the Four Legs had a rather delicious revelation of their own in the kitchen.
During prep, the team were peeling cucumbers for the pickles that go into their famous burger and grating cheese for the sauce. At some point, they tasted the two together, looked at each other and realised they had to do something with them. And so the cucumber, usually cast as a supporting act whose job is to bring acidity to a burger, landed a starring role of its own, with a cheese-and-cucumber sandwich making its way onto the menu for the Rome leg of the tour.
The Off-Menu is the Menu
If Milan was the litmus test for Sunday lunch, in Sestri Levante (GE) the Four Legs were practically adopted by L’Articiocca, the restaurant run by Chiara Malavasi and Claudio Lepore. The cooking here takes its cue from Ligurian tradition without getting too attached to it, following the availability of local ingredients day by day while leaving room for outside influences and less familiar produce. The kitchen itself is tiny, and Chiara was worried the London-based brigade might struggle to move in such a compact space. Ed, Cammy and Josh are pretty tall, after all, and not exactly the kind of team that goes unnoticed. But once the prep got underway, her concerns quickly faded. “We arrived in Sestri to the most brilliant and well equipped tiny kitchen we have ever worked in,” they recall.
The menu, however, had to contend with the realities of the local food supply, which doesn’t always play along with a chef’s plans. The fishing ban came into effect earlier than expected, so they just managed to get hold of the last monkfish and amberjack caught by local fishermen in time; the slaughter of the Cabannina, a local cattle breed, originally scheduled to coincide with the event, was postponed. In the end, dinner became a journey between London and Sestri Levante, without dressing up local traditions as a gastropub. Monkfish with the last courgettes of the season and octopus with butter, finished with an unexpected sweet-and-sour twist; handmade reginette alla genovese with wild boar and deep-water cuttlefish, a surf and turf in which Liguria takes the liberty of answering back to England; and the Dexter Burger, reimagined with locally caught amberjack in place of beef.
Dinner, though, was only part of the experience. The guys were introduced to everything the Ligurian Riviera had to offer: focaccia and milky coffee, the classic Genoese breakfast; farinata; Cabannina cheeses and the legendary prescinseua; artisan cured meats; minestrone; brandacujun; and salted anchovies from L’Anciua. Then came freshly made pesto and handmade corzetti, with Ed giving the pasta-making a go alongside the kitchen brigade. It was practically a crash course in Ligurian cooking, with the syllabus growing every time someone remembered one more thing they absolutely had to try. Chiara tells it with the enthusiasm of someone who knows that hosting guests also means wanting to feed them far beyond any reasonable expectation. “I’d warned them it would be like this, a bit like going to your grandma’s house.”
“The response to the food in Sestri was brilliant, compliments I will remember for a long time,” says Four Legs. “The homely feel of Articiocca is something I hope to replicate one day, somewhere full of history and memories.”
A Roman Snack Bar, London Style
Between Sestri Levante and Rome, there was a stop at Pacina, a winery in the Chianti hills with a history dating back to the year 1000. “The passion of the family who live and work there, the lunch they prepared for us, the stories that have built up over the years, and their commitment to sustainability and genuinely organic farming were all a source of inspiration,” they recall.
The final stop is Rome, at Vetro, in the Delle Vittorie neighbourhood, where an old corner grocery has been turned into a snack bar that looks as much to the Italian tavola calda as it does to American diners. The project, started by a group of friends, brings together simple but carefully thought-out dishes, natural wines served by the glass and on tap, and the informal atmosphere of an old-school bar, with the ambition of becoming a local meeting place. This is where the Four Legs arrive, armed with everything they’ve learnt along the way and a fair collection of stories to tell. Before service, though, there’s one more stop to make: Piatto Romano, a restaurant all three have been wanting to try for a long time. They expected to find mostly offal; what surprised them instead was the prominence of seasonal vegetables, which they hadn’t realised played such a central role in Roman cooking.
Vetro set out to bring its own take on the local bar into conversation with the London gastropub. “We wanted the menu to tell the story of these two places coming together, with six dishes from each side, divided into two sections: snacks and mains. We gave the Four Legs access to the ingredients supplied by our producers, and they used them to create dishes that best reflected their identity. That was the whole point of the evening: to bring their world into ours and adapt it to a snack bar.” Guglielmo Fedele, the chef, handled the collaboration with an easygoing confidence that the Four Legs appreciated even before service began. Cooking in someone else’s kitchen takes trust, especially when you’re not making dinner for a few friends but feeding a full dining room.
“The Dexter raw burger was definitely the dish that summed up the evening.” Their signature dish, adapted to the constraints of a small kitchen without compromising on what makes it theirs. And then, as we’d expected, the now-familiar cucumber-and-cheese combination made an appearance in the form of a classic afternoon tea-style finger sandwich.“It was a great meeting of an Italian-style snack bar and a London gastropub,” the team at Vetro say. Service, they recall, felt like one big party, with a great rapport between the two kitchen teams and a crowd busy eating, drinking and having fun. “Making delicious food whilst sharing shots of Jamesons with the crew from Vetro – it doesn’t get much more Four Legs than that”, the Londoners say.
What stays with you when you head back to the pub
When we ask the Four Legs what surprised them most, their answer has little to do with any particular dish. “Most surprising were the differences in cooking and approach between the different regions, they all had a very distinct personality.”
The cheeseburger, meanwhile, remained the one constant throughout the tour, a kind of calling card, while everything around it changed: the ingredients, the kitchens, the people and even the expectations of those sitting down at the table.
After knowing about the three stops, we ask them what they think a restaurant is. The answer is less romantic than you might expect: “A restaurant is a service provider. Whilst it should be an expression or extension of the owner it has to deliver on the fundamentals of a restaurant, good food, good drinks and good service.” A restaurant has to work. It has to feed people well, pour them a good drink, make them feel welcome and give them a reason to come back. Identity matters, but it can’t become an excuse to forget everything else. It’s a principle they learnt while building The Plimsoll, and one the trip brought back into focus, this time from inside other people’s kitchens.
The Four Legs have returned to London already keen to organise another trip to Italy. When they eventually release their account of the journey on YouTube, we’ll get to see a little more of everything that happened between one city and the next. For now, we know that three London-based chefs walked into three Italian kitchens and came away with new friends, a few ideas to take home and a new cheese-and-cucumber sandwich. And that, by the end of service in Rome, someone was already asking when they could do it all again. You don’t need much more to know a collaboration has worked; perhaps just one more round of Jameson shots.
