It is possible to argue, albeit rather annoyingly, that the geographical location of a restaurant doesn’t much matter; that if a new place serving the food of, say, Andalusia is doing an impressive enough job with the cooking, then the fact that it isn’t actually in Spain is less than relevant to the joy of the experience. And I do hold with this, up to a point. When restaurants are good, they are the best kind of cultural embassy. Of course, dinner out is not the same as travelling to the country represented by the food, but it’s a lot more than nothing. If you want to understand a culture, eat the food at its heart. I could spin that out to a mildly convincing 1,000 words.

But then I found myself eating a superb risotto Milanese in Milan, and that argument crumbled into ash. Which is funny, because the physical location of Ratanà isn’t all that. It occupies an admittedly handsome former rail warehouse, in a far less than handsome modern redevelopment just to the west of Milan central station. You reach it through a bouncy-surfaced children’s playground, bounded by high fences. It’s also easy to imagine being presented with a similar menu of northern Italian sharing dishes, at a Milan-inspired natural wine bar, only in Dalston. And yet, being here with these older, greying Italian waiters, briskly servicing the crowded dark wood tables, in a dining room of oiled oak floors and white walls and Italians taking lunch very seriously indeed, it becomes clear: location can matter.

Ratanà was opened in 2009 by chef Cesare Battisti, an exuberant figure with untameable hair, who wanted to champion Lombardy’s classic dishes, but to do so with less formality, linen and polished glassware than elsewhere in town. He wanted to lean into the virtues of the osteria. During my research ahead of a short trip, it was the Milanese restaurant everyone seemed to recommend, and by everyone, obviously, I mean Stanley Tucci and Nigella Lawson, who are both fans. The star dish is that risotto, as saffron-yellow as an anime setting sun, and topped with a hot hunk of roast bone, from which you scrape out the wobbly, steaming jewels of marrow. There are scribbles of both a sticky, meaty jus and a fiercely puréed gremolata the bright green of the Italian flag’s left panel and brisk with garlic and lemon. Risotto Milanese is one of those dishes that is easy to cook, but very hard to get right. Too heavy a hand on the saffron and it tastes soapy. It becomes relentless. But it’s also about texture. It has to hinge between comfortingly soft, but nutty with bite right at the heart of each grain. The Ratanà risotto Milanese really is everything.