The wine list at Fellini Koolini's runs deeper than the food in front of it would suggest. More than thirty wines pour by the glass, joined by flights, a reserve list, and corkage for anyone who brings a bottle of their own. It is a beverage program with real ambition, folded into a Richmond Row address that otherwise reads as familiar Italian comfort. Pasta, pizza, and a long bench of tapas carry the kitchen, while the dining room leans into the feel of a quaint Italian home. One address holds two registers, and the evening can be built around either.
The pasta does the defining work. Linguini Carbonara is the comfort lane: smoked bacon, garlic, onion, herbs, and Alfredo, the order to calibrate against before the table wanders. Sicilian Penne is its louder counterpart, with hot Italian sausage, pancetta, meatballs, onions, and roasted red peppers in a spicy tomato sauce. Between them sit the Chicken and Shrimp Dill Fettuccini, sun-dried tomato and spinach folded into cream, and the Linguine di Mare, with shrimp, mussels, calamari, and clams in a white-wine tomato sauce. Everything past the pasta reads as flexibility rather than scatter. Tapas open the meal: Mussels Scarfone in a white-wine tomato broth with garlic bread, Brown Butter Brussels finished with Parmigiano Reggiano, arancini fried from three-cheese risotto. The Artichoke and Asiago Dip arrives with pita points, and a warm spinach and chèvre salad turns pancetta, candied pecans, and balsamic into a starter with some weight. Pizza handles the sharing, from a Margherita built on smoked mozzarella and bocconcini to a Roasted Garlic Chicken and Fontina turned richer with pancetta and spinach. The mains hold a few anchors of their own, among them the Marry Me Chicken in a basil and sun-dried tomato cream, and dessert stays classic, the tiramisu among the holdovers. A mixed table rarely struggles to find its plate.
The wine program is the clearest sign of how the kitchen reads an evening. A by-the-glass list this deep is unusual for a casual Italian dining room, and it comes with real structure: flights for tasting across styles, reduced-price bottles to carry home with a meal, tasting dinners announced to a mailing list. Wine becomes part of the night's design rather than an afterthought on the last page, and corkage welcomes the bottle someone has been saving for an occasion. A kitchen set up this way can carry a deliberate, wine-led dinner as readily as a weeknight plate of pasta.
The pairing of comfort and ambition goes back to the beginning. Fellini Koolini's opened in April 1990 alongside The Runt Club, the bar that still shares its Albert Street footprint, which is why the dining room goes dark on Mondays and sends its regulars next door. Thirty-six years on, the food holds to primarily Italian with the occasional detour, and the décor keeps the quaint-Italian-home character that was always the point. The name has outlasted most of what opened around it downtown.
What the menu and the wine list set up, the layout delivers. Three private rooms carry the group business — the Library seats up to twenty, the Venice Room up to thirty, the Ball Room up to fifty — which makes Fellini Koolini's a default for the dinners that need a door of their own: rehearsal dinners, office parties, birthdays, the occasional celebration of a life. Catering pushes the same food out to homes and offices, and a patio opens the seating when the weather turns. Takeout and delivery cover the nights nobody wants to leave home, and the kitchen keeps vegetarian and gluten-free options on hand for the table that needs them. It all runs from one kitchen on one downtown block: a reserve glass for two on a slow evening, or a private dinner when the occasion calls for it.
The official history gives Fellini Koolini's more than three decades of London context. That operating history helps the restaurant read as part of downtown's dining memory rather than a generic Italian stop.
The current menu gives the table several ways to build dinner: pasta as the centre, tapas as the opening move, and pizza as a flexible share. That range is the main reason the restaurant works for mixed tables.
The wine page gives the restaurant a stronger beverage identity than many casual Italian rooms. By-the-glass breadth, reserve-list language, corkage, wine-to-go, and tasting dinners make wine part of the visit design.
The wine program is strong enough to lead the visit. By-the-glass breadth, reserve-list language, corkage, take-home bottles with food purchase, and tasting dinners give diners several ways to build a bottle or glass around pasta, seafood, and pizza.
Fellini Koolini's works naturally for a slower dinner: pasta as the centre, wine by the glass, and a room identity built for lingering rather than rushing. It is an easy pick when the plan is conversation, a shared starter, and one strong pasta each.
The comfort here is pasta-led: smoked-bacon Carbonara, spicy Sicilian Penne, cream-rich Chicken & Shrimp Dill Fettuccini, and familiar pizza choices. It is the kind of menu where the safer order still has enough detail to feel chosen.
The event setup is unusually clear for a restaurant of this shape. Three named rooms give small and medium groups a way to plan birthdays, corporate dinners, showers, rehearsal meals, or catered gatherings without converting a regular dinner into a logistics project.
Groups have more than one path through the menu: tapas to open, pizza for sharing, pasta for individual mains, and private rooms for planned occasions. That makes Fellini Koolini's easier to use than a narrow date-night-only Italian room.
The restaurant has enough ceremony for birthdays and anniversary-style dinners without becoming formal. Wine, pasta, private rooms, and a long-running London identity give the meal a sense of occasion while keeping the food familiar.
Share the nuances of your visit to Fellini Koolini's in London — the standout dishes, the room, the service.
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