On any given Friday night at Sova, someone will walk in with a bag of their own records under their arm and hand them over to be played to the DJ while they explore the world of Eastern European wines. It’s a very refreshing and authentic concept for a restaurant just two minutes off the touristy Portobello Road market.
Sova is a “wine and vinyl” bar, and both are taken very seriously. The records dotting the shelves are not just decoration. There are DJs on Friday and Saturday nights, and the room turns properly lively after dark. During the day it is the opposite, very quiet, low light and low noise, a space you can actually hold a conversation in. The weekend service runs non stop, so you can walk in at four in the afternoon for a single glass.
The wine is the part that surprised us the most. Notting Hill is a neighbourhood of very good butchers and very expensive antiques, and the wine list usually follows the same script. Sova pours natural wine from Eastern Europe. The ones we tried came from Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia, and all of them, while obscure to us, were truly high quality.
Natural wine divides people, but the wines we tried were not the funky for the sake of funky type, but rather very specific wines from countries most London lists ignore.
We came for lunch and stayed considerably longer than planned. First to arrive was a board of Balkan and alpine cheeses, sourdough from Notting Hill Bakery, and seaweed butter. Then raw tuna with adjika, a Georgian chilli paste, which gives the fish a low, slow heat rather than a sharp one, and a mushroom and tomato salad that screamed autumn, earthy and a slightly sweet.
The larger plates held up just as well. Duck breast with plum sauce and crispy sea bass with garden beans and tarragon, which seemed to us to be a quiet spin on fish and chips.
Go at lunch if you want to taste everything and talk. Go on a Friday night if you want the records. Either way, let them pour you something you have never heard of, because that is the whole point of the place.
Note: Sova provided support for the reporting of this story.