Nifeislife – Italian Food to your Door

Nice Italian Food Every Day from NifeisLife.

Guest Feature from Adrian York:

When Fiona at London Unattached asked me if I would like to review an internet Italian grocery delivery service called Nifeislife I didn’t hesitate for long. There are many Italian food items that aren’t available even at the more upmarket supermarkets and the Soho delis have a fairly limited stock, so the opportunity to put them through their paces was irresistible.

The first element was to navigate the website which necessitated a very simple login process. The site is set out with separate pages for product areas such as Cheese & Dairy, Ham, Salami & Meat, Italian wines and Gelati and sorbet; there are also handy pages for organic product, household goods and for shopping by brand and region. The range is much bigger than I was expecting and certainly bigger than many boutique deli sites that I have seen. In fact it’s more like shopping at a good Italian supermarket.

Ordering and checking out are straightforward but what did I go for and was it delicious I hear you ask?

With a budget of £40 I wanted to create a lunch for four.

I ordered a box of mixed vegetables (4 kg/£16.67), a jar of tuna di ventresca (314ml/£15) (the best quality from the belly loin of the fish), some sausages (500g/£6.49), a burrata from Puglia (250g/£4.80), a bag of whole grain Venere black rice (500g/£3.40) and a jar of Ambrosoli Millefiore honey (250g/£3.50).

I had asked for the 8-12 slot for delivery the following morning at my flat. The food arrived within the time slot but the courier didn’t ring through to my flat and left the boxes just inside the building’s front door. This is something that needs to be sorted out as it would have been really annoying if it had disappeared.

The food was sensibly packed and the real revelation was the veg box which was packed with goodies. There were three artichokes which covered my starter, carrots, spuds, a couple of bulbous aubergines, a couple of types of tomatoes and some courgettes.

So we boiled up the artichokes for a handful of minutes and served with a mustard vinaigrette; the rest of the veg were roasted with a large splash of olive oil and some garlic cloves, the sausages were thrown in the oven near the end. The burrata and tuna were served without any interference from yours truly and it was all served up with the deliciously nutty black rice.

I have to say that all the produce was excellent. The veg was fresh and full of flavour, as was the Burrata (a turbocharged mozzarella) which is so often disappointing. The bottled tuna came in good oil and was compact and with a richness of flavour that you don’t find in a tin, and the sausages were plump, juicy and full of flavour.

With a £20 minimum order I should imagine that Nifeislife is a godsend for London based Italian expats and really useful for the rest of us when we need authentic foodstuffs or just great veg, cheese, fish and meat.

Delivery is free for orders over £60 and if ordered in the morning comes on the same day in London and on the next day in the rest of the UK. At the moment there are certain items like fresh fish that they can only deliver to Central London so maybe that Knightsbridge flat makes sense after all…

Check out ‘Nice Italian Food Every Day’ (NIFE) from the  NIFEislife website