Chives says "neighbourhood" quietly but distinctly. It is a small, intimate kind of restaurant. The walls are white, without decoration. The floor is wood the colour of corn, as are the tables and chairs, which softens the cool of the white. The menu is interesting without being in-your-face. No first course is more than £5.50, no main course more than £13.50, and the puddings are £5 or less. And yet the bill for Bill and I came to £82.60. It just seems impossible these days for two to eat out reasonably well (and our lunch at Chives was rather better than reasonably well) in London for less than £80.
That will probably get me a whole raft of letters from readers, chefs and their PRs telling me about some gem of gems where you can get three courses of the finest food on God's own acre for less than a tenner and with a magnum of bottled sunshine thrown in for good measure. But, in my experience, such places are so few and far between that you are more likely to win the lottery.
That is not to say that you cannot eat pleasurably and decently for less than £40 a head. You can, and I have reviewed a few places along those lines. But when it comes to your common-or-garden smart, metropolitan eating house with style and social ambition, then 80 quid for two seems the norm - and that means 90-odd quid, if you add in a fairly standard 12.5% service charge (tip, gratuity, call it what you will).
Of course, drinks account for a certain amount of the total. We drank a bottle of juicy Tuscan Morellino di Scansano that weighed in at £22 - probably a mark-up of around 200%, which isn't extravagant by restaurant standards - and this was very well worthwhile drinking from a list largely devoted to Italian wines. To that we must add a brace of Campari sodas, £10 the pair, which is excessive but not abnormal; one double espresso and a single, £3.60 all-in. So, the total for non-food items was £35.60, a shade under half the total. That left £47 on food, or £23.50 for three courses each, which doesn't seem so bad - and, in fact, wasn't bad, considering the quality of the grub.
You can tell a lot about a chef from the way in which he or she treats small details. A little cup of cauliflower soup came our way before the main show kicked off. It was smooth and velvety from passing through sieves, and indubitably cauliflowery, with the vegetable flavours seamed into top-quality chicken stock. It was the stock that made this little dish something of a show-stopper.
Bill went the way of a brochette of crispy salmon with vinaigrette of capers and chives (I give you menu-speak raw and unadorned). The salmon was average-quality farmed stuff, but the treatment gave that unremarkable protein a real touch of class. The top was, indeed, crisp, bringing out a certain meatiness, and the vinaigrette was luscious, fresh, tingling the tongue, without killing the flavour of the fish.
The ravioli of duck confit with a velouté of lentils on which I lavished a good deal of time was quite the opposite. Whereas Bill's dish sprang around the mouth with zip and energy, mine was subtle, comforting, elegantly muscular, gradually filling out as I chewed and swallowed. There was only one raviolo, but its casing was made of delicate, lightweight pasta, as it needs to be. The filling was delicately fibrous, the sweet meat devoid of all fattiness. On top was a little frizz of what I take to have been shredded skin roasted to a crunch. The earthy nature of the lentils had been given an additional authority by a superb duck stock cut with a shade of vinegar.
This sophisticated handling of the underlying materials helped make my next course of roast cod with shellfish ragout and bouillabaisse sauce a class act, too. The sauce tasted resolutely and resoundingly of shellfish, that wonderful toasted sweetness that comes from roasting lobster, langoustines and prawn shells before you start making the stock. The cod had also been given the crispy treatment, which, I suspect, involves a judicious bit of salting beforehand to draw out some of the liquid. The flesh underneath broke away in easy, glistening sections. It was a bit of a star turn.
The salad that I had asked to go with it was one of the few disappointments: the leaves were a run-of-the-mill jumble of torn-up bits that you can find in most supermarkets, with a dressing from which someone appeared to have omitted the oil. It was inedible.
Some cost-cutting on the raw ingredients also cast a shadow over Bill's rump of lamb with crushed potatoes and jus Niçoise. It was a dish that would have worked if the lamb had had any kind of distinctive flavour, but this particular beast had a fugitive, slightly watery quality, which provided no focus for the dish. The other parts were fine, although I do long for a chef who can think of something other than some variation on the Niçoise/ Provençal/olive-crusted/garlic-and-something approach to lamb. This wasn't bad, just disappointing in view of the surrounding quality.
We returned to the sunny uplands with our puddings - a pear-and-almond tart with exemplary pastry and a sublime pear sorbet, and some wonderful light, crisp peach beignets with a showcase vanilla ice cream.
So, I paid up £82.60 (or £92.84 including service charge, tip or gratuity). I pondered on the price. It had been worth it - I felt very well fed, and not fed up. Still, £82.60 is no small potatoes. How do you get away for less these days?
