Telephone: 020 7935 9088
Address: 8 Seymour Street, London W1
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £100
Let me confess: I am a nightmare in restaurants. This is because I'm neurotic about being ignored by waiters. To be honest, I'm neurotic about being ignored by anybody (Mother! Return my calls! Please!), but waiters are at the top of the list. Just a few minutes' hiatus between being given a table and a menu can have me lobbing cruet sets at staff as they pass our table without stopping. If they can't be bothered to give me a list of all the things I might want to buy, what chance is there that they'll get them to me once I've ordered? When I am dead and gone, I know what my own personal hell will be: a table in some Terence Conran joint in which I am ignored by every waiter for eternity.
I have tried convincing my wife Pat that this neurosis is a useful quality in a restaurant critic, that it makes me acutely sensitive to the ebb and flow of service. She says this is arch cobblers, that it is a complete pain in the arse to spend a meal with someone whose gaze is fixed almost entirely on what is happening in the room over her shoulder.
Fair enough. But just as the paranoid can have enemies, so can the impatient be kept waiting. Locanda Locatelli, the new restaurant at London's Churchill Inter-Continental hotel from Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli, is at least designed with people like me in mind. On the wall opposite where I was seated was a huge fish-eye lens mirror which gave a wide view of the amber jewelbox of a modernist dining room and the waiters who managed to spend a lot of the evening staying away from us. It took an age to get bread, to get a wine list, to get half the dishes on to the table. When the impeccably Italian waiters did arrive, they could be the very embodiment of charm. One of them had a voice so deep and mellifluous you didn't hear his words - you felt them rumbling in your nethers. It's just that, like Tony Blair's socialist instincts, we didn't get to see them as often as we would have liked.
All of which was a huge disappointment to me because Locatelli's name, and more importantly his food, has a massive reputation. He won a Michelin star while at Zafferano, widely regarded as one of the very best Italians in London, and the arrival of his own place was meant to be a special event. The problem is that when the service is as haphazard as it was here, it makes you question the quality of the food. They are only doing themselves down, because almost everything we ate was very good indeed.
I won't list every dish we tried because there were six of us that night, but there were very few duds. My tagliatelle with sardines and sultanas may sound a little exotic, but it worked extraordinarily well, the fruit pointing up the sweetness (rather than the fishiness) of the sardines. As to the buttery pasta, it was perfect: silky, light, and with just the right amount of bite. Likewise, a dish of linguine with clams was a model of its kind, with the chilli and garlic used for aromatics rather than burn. From the antipasti, an assembly of unctuous pan-fried cheese with walnuts and pine kernels was met with rapturous oohing noises. It was only a pity there was a five-minute gap between the first four starters arriving and the remaining two.
It was even more of a strain to get the main courses to table. One dish, a chunk of roast cod with lentils, arrived 10 minutes after all the others. There can be only one explanation for this: they forgot it. Rightly, they took it off the bill. Again, they were just doing themselves down because it was a fine piece of cod, expertly cooked, on a rich stew of lentils. A pork fillet, still just pink inside, and remarkably tender, came with a deliciously crisp mustard and fruit crust.
I went for the special of the day, tender roast pigeon on a dense red-wine reduction with what looked like a generous serving of sliced black truffle - until I saw the less-than-generous price tag of £24 on the bill. Indeed, pricing here is what might be called keen, and that led me to question the very nature of what we were being served. We have come, for good or ill, to regard Italian food as something for the soul. There can be few more viscerally pleasing dishes than a heap of perfectly cooked pasta, simply dressed. While I find myself admiring Locatelli's food, I'm not convinced that the execution is developed enough to justify the hoopla. The service problems may have had something to do with that.
Honour was saved by the puddings, where the 'Wow!' factor really did kick in. Chocolate and banana beignets were exquisitely delicate little fritters with a stunning jasmine ice cream; a ricotta tart was soft and light and satisfying; that cliché, the tiramisu, was a fabulous confection of cream and coffee and sponge wrapped in a cylinder of the lightest, crispest pastry. It was described by its recipient as the best she had ever eaten. And she's eaten a lot of tiramisu.
But as I've said before, the memories of the lacklustre service always end up jostling for prominence with the memories of good food. That night Pat lay tossing and turning in bed. She had ended with a decaf coffee, and by three in the morning was convinced they'd given her the unemasculated stuff instead. 'At the end of the evening, I didn't trust the waiters to get it right,' she said wearily. For £50 a head we have the right to expect a good night's sleep.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
