Telephone: 020 7729 5708
Address: 28 Paul Street, London EC2

I want no truck with doffing waiters, said Dolcelatte, I am tired of the rigmarole of fancy restaurants. Back to basics, that's what we need. Righty-ho, I said, and booked us into The Fox. The Fox promised basics. It is the progeny of The Eagle, gastro-landmark on Farringdon Road, London, sanctuary for many a City and Guardian saddo, and grandparent to an entire generation of gastropubs.

The principles that The Eagle still embodies - basic decor and furniture, decent beer, a wine list short on variety but long on reason, and fast, full-flavoured, Euro-funk food - are to be found at The Fox. It stands on the corner of a byway just off the suicidally busy Great Eastern Street in Shore-ditch, or the City of London, depending on how you like to draw the social boundaries. It has the airs and graces of the study-in-brown, slightly-beaten-up, roughed-and-scuffed, louche, laid-back, better-class-of-boozer.

A smattering of louche, laid-back, better-class, younger-than-springtime boozers loafed around the bar downstairs, making it look like a real pub, while we went upstairs to the dining room, where - a real innovation this, compared with The Eagle - you can book a table. In fact, there's even a terrace on which you can eat on balmy summer evenings. It's slipped in between The Fox and the building next door, vertiginous walls reaching up to a small patch of sky. At eye level, there is something of the Islington roof garden about the alfresco arrangements, with whitewashed brick, and olive, bay and fig trees in big terracotta pots. Above, say, about 12ft, the brick returns to its natural condition, blackened by a century of sooted rain, odd pipes and bits of metal sticking out here and there. It's all very Dickensian, and rather romantic in its oddity.

Dolcelatte and I would have eaten there had not rain stopped play before the first forkful of the first course reached the lips, and we were forced to dash into the dining room proper, which, in style and substance, isn't all that different from the bar below. Tables and chairs have that only-five-not-very-careful-owners look. Indeed, so long-suffering had been the chair on which I was sitting that I was worried that it might not go the distance with my bum on it. (It survived, in case you're interested.)

Another innovation: there's a typed menu - three first courses, three main courses, one pudding and a cheese. Somehow, the dishes don't seem quite as appetising in cold print as those advertised on the blackboard above the bar and open-plan kitchen at The Eagle. It could be, too, that the line-up simply wasn't so enticing. The Fox seems to have moved away from the gutsy, Iberian-influenced food-with-attitude of The Eagle. That is not to say that the food there is highly refined. It isn't, but it leans towards the gentler variations of the Provençal kitchen. So it was onion, olive and tomato tart and then flat bread and ratatouille for Dolcelatte, and lambs' tongues with French beans and capers followed by cold poached chicken with chopped salad and tahini for me.

It was all perfectly decent stuff. The lambs' tongues were nicely poached and peeled, and the green leaves and beans among which they hid glistened in a suitably oily salad, very much in The Eagle style. The onion etcetera tart was heavier on the pastry around the edge than seemed strictly necessary, but the filling was fittingly unctuous, even if the onions had not been caramelised to a degree that satisfied Dolcelatte. The flat bread and ratatouille was flat bread and ratatouille, both good versions of their respective classes, and copious. The chicken with tahini was equally generous in portion. Indeed, so generous was it that it showed up the limitations of the dish. Tahini in large quantities turns rather beige in terms of taste. We followed that with one pudding - cherries and meringue - again, well-prepared, if not grub to set the pulses racing.

And if your pulse isn't set racing, then £13.50 for two courses and £18 for three seems a bit steep, to put it mildly. And when you think things are a bit steep, you tend to look rather more sceptically at what you're eating. You can have three courses of rather more finesse in every sense for £21 at La Trompette, not to mention three courses for £13.95 at Le Gallois, which I reviewed the other week. I couldn't fault the preparation, or the cheerfulness and competence of the service. If you like the haphazard decorative qualities of The Eagle, then you'll warm to those of The Fox. But it still has some way to go before it matches the standards of the great original.

· Open Lunch, all week, 12.30-3pm (3.30pm for bar food); dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30-10pm. Menus: £13.50 for two courses; £18 for three. All major credit and debit cards, except Amex and Diners Club. Wheelchair access to bar only (no disabled WC).