Mele e Pere

I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the brainstorming session where they came up with the name Mele e Pere. "Well it's going to be an Italian restaurant, so let's give it an Italian name!" some young marketing wonk with heavy-rimmed glasses and a choppy hairdo would have intoned with the gravity usually reserved for decoding the human genome. 

"Yah," Livia the intern would have continued, "but maybe something a little...ironic?" thereby at least justifying the lunch money she'd later go and spend on Marlboro Lights. 

"Uh, now guys, I'm thinking waaaay outside my Dr Dre Beats Audio Boombox on this," Zander the 'Ideas Furnace' would volunteer, "but hear what I'm saying, si? Well it's Italian. And its down some stairs. And what could be more ironic, y'know, than Cockney rhyming slang - but in Italian? Apples and pears, stairs. Mele e Pere - stair-ay!" At which point, and following a brief awe-struck silence, everyone would applaud before adjourning to the John Snow for celebratory Staropramens all round.

And so it came to pass that Mele e Pere was rendered in neon in the tricolore of the Italian flag, appended to the front of the building (a corner plot on busy Brewer Street) and the windows filled with a Damien Hirst-ish installation of beautiful Murano glass apples and pears. So far so conceptual. Except that if you didn't know what was behind the name and very elegant facade you'd walk straight past, thinking that it was...well, some sort of Soho creative agency.

Photo by Michael Ford anastasia-duck.com

In fact, down the mele e pere is a very decent restaurant, serving modern, unpretentious Italian food. A large chic bar area gives onto an arched dining room decorated in fashionable low-key neutrals, sultrily-lit by wall-mounted anglepoise lamps. Underground spaces can feel dingy and cold; this room is neither.

My vegetarian guest, uber-blogger Michael Ford, struggled to find much that was meat-free on the menu but that was about our only complaint. While waiting for our starters we tried Mele e Pere's home-made vermouth - a citrusy white and sharper rosso - which at £4 for a generous measure made for a perfect aperitif. Michael started with maltagliati - 'misshapen' - pasta with walnut pesto, chilli and garlic, which was excellent, as was my thick soup of chestnut, curly kale and white beans which put me in mind of a breadless ribollita. A generous sprinkling of Pecorino Romano added welcome tang. 

Potato gnocchi - Michael had again to order from the pasta section for his main course for want of other options - were an exercise in luxurious simplicity, drizzled in white truffle oil and stirred through with shavings of slightly dry but nonetheless discernibly fungal Italian black truffle. My roasted wild duck was served alluringly pink and was deliciously tender, quince puree bringing a nice acidity to the plate. A side order - one of any from the menu is included in the price of mains, giving a flexibility of choice I'd like to see catch on elsewhere - of broccoli with chilli and almonds was good if a little cold.

To finish we shared some Fontal and Gorgonzola cheese, served with mostarda di frutta - candied fruit in a mustard syrup, a delicious cross between chutney and piccalilli. Had space allowed we could've chosen from a short list of classic puds - tiramisu, pannacotta - or Mele e Pere's home-made ice-creams and sorbets, which given the quality of everything else we ate I'm sure would have been splendid.

The wine list is almost exclusively Italian and quirkily categorised under headings such as 'The Jewels In The Crown', 'The Aromatics' and 'Gems From All Over The Boot'. Our bottle of Pignataro Montepulciano d'Abruzzo delivered a lot of fruit and flavour for £25; the list starts as low as £16.50 and there's plenty of choice by the glass and half-bottle too. Thought's also been given to cocktails and digestifs; drink is clearly taken as seriously as the food although working through too much of any of it might make the return ascent of the mele e pere rather tricky.

So bang slap in the middle of Soho there's a smart restaurant serving honest, unfussy Italian food and interesting drinks at fair prices - you just need to know that it's there, and now you do. One of the categories on the wine list is 'Hidden Treasures'; it's a category Mele e Pere falls into itself. 

Mele e Pere, 46 Brewer Street, London W1F 9TF Tel: 020 7096 2096 www.meleepere.co.uk

I was invited to review Mele e Pere







 Posted by +Hugh Wright

Ida, Queen's Park

One of my dear late father's favourite aphorisms - which I always thought of, fondly, as his statements of the bleeding obvious - was to say to anyone who complained that they couldn't find something, "You always find it in the last place you look!" It never occurred to him that this was the case because having found something you cease to look for it, but I loved him too much to point this out.

Now, as my brace of regular readers will know, my pal Michael Ford and I have had a few hits and misses in our search for a restaurant that caters just as well to his vegetarian lacto-free diet as to my 'if it baas, moos or oinks, kill it, heat it, sauce it and serve it' approach to eating. But would you believe it, my dear old dad was right after all because it looks like we've found it in the last place we looked - right on newly-moved-to-London Michael's doorstep.

Gauthier Soho

After the unmitigated disaster of our recent experience at Les Deux Salons, I wanted my next meal with fashion-and-now-food blogger Michael Ford to be really special. In a recent conversation about places with a good reputation for their vegetarian offering - Michael being sadly afflicted by that mercifully rare condition which causes its sufferers to forbid themselves lovely meat - newly-Michelin-starred Gauthier Soho cropped up as being somewhere that we were both keen to try, and although only one indicator of quality, Bibendum's having chosen the restaurant to receive his five-pointed favour was enough to persuade me that this was somewhere we could be guaranteed a good time.

And 'good' it most certainly was, at times very good indeed, but I knew before I'd put down my fork at the end of the seventh course that it was going to be a challenge to write up. For one thing, Michael and I both had the tasting menu and as his was vegetarian and mine wasn't, between us we racked up about a dozen different courses - that's a lot of food requiring a lot of adjectives. Or it would be, if it weren't for the second problem, namely that everything was so uniformly...nice that a dozen synonyms for that would do the job, albeit without making for remotely interesting reading.

But write it up I must, or I would not be a very good blogger (bitch-slap to the first person who says "No change there then") so, it being a very good place to start, let's start at the very beginning. Gauthier Soho occupies a largely-unmodified Georgian townhouse on Romilly Street in Soho, formerly known as the Lindsay House and home to Richard Corrigan's signature restaurant until he decamped to Mayfair a couple of years ago. It's an attractive if impractical space for a restaurant, with no one main dining room but several rooms of various sizes over its three floors. The decor is don't-scare-the-horses luxe; warm neutrals, soft lighting and softer carpets.

The Gauthier of the name is Alexis Gauthier, erstwhile head chef of Michelin-starred Roussillon in Pimlico; in February 2011, barely nine months after it opened, Gauthier Soho won its first star while Roussillon's was taken away. Gauthier describes his style of cooking as 'cuisine by intuition and instinct', proudly relying on his experience and understanding of ingredients and technique rather than recipe books and tradition in order to create his dishes. It's also been described, uglily, as 'vegecentric', meaning that the focus even in meat dishes is on the vegetable.

You'd think then that there'd be more than two vegetarian dishes on the à la carte menu, especially one that is divided into five sections from which diners are invited to choose three, four or the full five plats. On the contrary; it's very meat- and fish-heavy and vegetarians wanting more than two plats are obliged to opt for the seven-course gout du jour. In fairness, that had always been our intention, but it seems rather an odd state of affairs. As indeed is the fact that I've still not told you anything about what we actually ate.

I had foie gras with crisp, thin slices of baked apple (very nice), langoustine with ginger and fennel (happily substituted by the kitchen for the advertised celery, to which - restaurateurs please note, poisoners please don't - I am allergic), black truffle risotto with parmesan and veal jus (very luxurious, quite tasty, but a bit wet), seared rose veal with...I don't remember what, something polenta-y I think (nice, although the searing was more like light cooking, rendering the meat a smidgeon tough) and then rhubarb with rhubarb sorbet (a lovely, zingy, reviving facial slap of a dish) followed by Gauthier's signature Louis XV, a chocolate and wafer confection with a thick, viscous chocolate coating and a shaving of real gold leaf on top. It was, you've guessed it, very...nice, like a Michelin-starred Twix Fino. Cheeses, French bien sur, were terrific.

If I'm not at all enthusiastic about any of this, I'm certainly not critical of it either; there was nothing wrong with any of it, nothing whatsoever, but in seven courses only one mouthful really made me sit up and take notice (the rhubarb) while the rest was just so polite and refined that I found myself wishing that there could be just a little spice here, or allium there, or contrast somewhere to liven things up a bit.

All the niceties of fine dining were present and correct and certainly added value to what, at £68 for seven courses (£60 for the vegetarian version which Michael has eloquently written about here) was certainly excellent value for money. Amuse-bouches were lovely (I particularly liked a truffled quail's egg) as for the most part were the petit-fours, although one bite of an as-bad-as-it-sounds basil truffle had us both screwing up our noses in distaste and leaving the rest.

Inexplicably, there's no matching wine flight available or even suggestions for wines by the glass to accompany the tasting menus and the sommelier wasn't on hand to assist so I had to make a noble stab at choosing something from the lengthy list that would work, or at least not clash, with everything; an Argentina Villa Vieja Viognier at £27 did the job for the savouries while a glass each of Plessis saw us through the desserts. When another table's bottle of wine was erroneously emptied into our glasses - another reason to let diners do it themselves, dear restaurateurs? - another bottle was opened and the exact amount of ours that had been wasted was replaced, then a top up given. Good service recovery, but the initial slip-up isn't the sort of thing you expect at this level.

Other little niggles worthy of note: in what I can only imagine is meant to be a mark of respect to the building's townhouse past, guests have to ring an old-fashioned push doorbell for entry, and the loud peal annoyed the living hell out of me as it went off every few minutes throughout much of the epic four hours that we were there. It would be irritating enough even in a busier, buzzier place, but slight gripe number two is that Gauthier Soho is otherwise strikingly, monastically quiet; I'm not a fan of muzak in restaurants - though who is, for that matter - but because of the mish-mash of small dining spaces no one room can ever build up the elusive atmosphere that makes a restaurant somewhere you enjoy being and would want to return to.

Which leads us to the big question, I suppose, which is would I recommend Gauthier Soho, and indeed I would - my body-double Bibendum rates it worth a visit and so do I, but with some caveats. Come if you want to experience good food, prepared thoughtfully with obvious technical expertise and care, in surroundings well-suited to contemplation, at not excessive prices. But if you're after more of a thrill, something to amaze and delight you and serve up a side order of excitement with your spectacle, then this is probably not the place for you.

My search for somewhere which caters really, truly, exceptionally well for my vegetarian Michael goes on. Suggestions are most warmly invited.

Gauthier Soho, 21 Romilly Street, London W1D 5AF Tel: 020 7494 3111 http://www.gauthiersoho.co.uk

Les Deux Salons

One of the most common assumptions about restaurant bloggers is that we'd all really like to be professional restaurant critics, and some, I don't doubt, would. I wouldn't, because I'd be crap at it; I don't have a critic's detachment, and it goes against my nature to actively look for the bad as well as the good. In blogging as in life, it is simply my nature that I always look for the positive. Be it people, situations, art, books or, in the present context, restaurants, I live by the ever-hopeful premise that in everything and everyone there is something inherently good; even Hitler loved his dog.

You'll appreciate then how hard it is for me that I really can't think of a single good word to say about Les Deux Salons, a sprawling all-day brasserie located just off the Strand. On paper it should be so good; owners Will Smith and Anthony Demetre are the chaps behind Michelin-starred Arbutus in Soho and Wild Honey in Mayfair, so it's certainly got pedigree. But based on my recent experience, for afternoon tea with fabulous fashion blogger Michael Ford, Les Deux Salons may prove to be the mutt of the litter.

Anyone who's been to Dean Street Townhouse - as I have just a couple of (dozen) times - will recognise the sort of dark wood, dark colours, brass fittings look that Les Deux Salons has gone for, both having been designed by the increasingly ubiquitous Martin Brudnizki. However, whereas from day one the Townhouse looked worn-in and welcoming, the room here - or the room we were in; there are of course deux - just looks like an off-the-shelf, generic brasserie, the paint too glossy, the 'aged' mirrors obviously brand new. It doesn't feel like any love's gone into the interior, nor does there seem to be much attention paid to what goes on within it; I noticed several wobbling tables, one of our teacups was stained and the dirty cloths on adjacent tables were allowed to remain in situ and in sight for far too long.

By far the worst offence however was the meal itself. It might seem unfair to judge a restaurant on something as incidental as afternoon tea rather than its a la carte offering, but my feeling is that if a restaurant is going to operate all day, then it should maintain its standards all day. Michael and I chose the Champagne Afternoon Tea at £25, consisting (as one would expect) of tea, finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, a choice of cakes and a glass of Champagne. I say Champagne; what we were brought was certainly a sparkling wine, and quite possibly a demi-sec Champagne, but tasted suspiciously like Prosecco. Without it we would have paid £7.50 less, but even then I don't think we would have felt that we'd had value for money.

The finger sandwiches, of which there were half a dozen each, were the sorriest, dullest assortment I've ever seen. Michael's vegetarian selection was entirely cheese - the same cheese at that - while mine was barely more varied; so-so salmon, processed ham, all in very ordinary, very dry sliced bread. Neither of us finished our measly six fingers despite Michael's  having not eaten that day and my famously prodigious appetite. There was no sign of say, egg and cress, or cucumber, the kind of light, tasty fillings one expects, and usually gets, at afternoon tea.

Our scones were, in fairness, pretty good - that really is about the most enthusiasm I can muster  - but the cakes were dreadful. Chocolate cake, listed on the menu as 'moist', was so dense that the first - and last - forkful stuck in my throat. Quatre quarts, described uninspiringly by our waiter as 'like a dry cake', was like a dry cake. We didn't have the appetite or interest to try the carrot cake; for all I know it could have been the most amazing feat of bakery since Monsieur Carême invented the soufflé, but I doubt it. Our teas, from an unexciting but OK selection, were fine.

Service was...well service was alright, but not great. Our waiter - or at least, the waiter who we saw the most of  - was efficient enough but lacked warmth, and seemed to almost resent any questions or interaction over and above the bare minimum (Michael's request for vegetarian sandwiches for example was greeted with a look of such incredulity that a third-party observer might have thought we'd asked him to find us transport to the sun). When another waiter came to clear our table and I politely explained why more than half of our food remained untouched  - basically because it was dry, heavy stodge - he did thank me and say that he would 'tell the kitchen' but this didn't translate into any reduction on the bill which, with 12.5% service, came in at a hefty £28 each for mediocre food, average tea and ordinary possibly-not-even Champagne. The Woleseley it most certainly ain't.

All that aside, I did greatly enjoy the company; fortunately Michael was sufficiently laid back as to be able to laugh off the dreadfulness of it all and we enjoyed our couple of hours gossiping. If you're at all interested in fashion, or simply enjoy good writing and photography, then you could do a lot worse than subscribe to Michael's fabulous blog, Anastasia & Duck. But that, I'm afraid, is the only positive thing I can find to say about my experience of Les Deux Salons.

Les Deux Salons, 40-42 William IV Street, London WC2N 4DD Tel: 020 7420 2050 http://www.lesdeuxsalons.co.uk/