The Hartley Bar and Dining Rooms, 64 Tower Bridge Road, London SE1 (020 7394 7023). Meal for two, with wine and service, £65

I tried to resist. I knew, from the moment I saw it on the menu, that I would be guilty of gross predictability if I chose it. But what was I to do? The dish was listed as 'braised pig's head, honey roast pork belly, scallops, champ and cabbage'. It was the floozy of dishes, its skirt hitched far higher over the knee than is strictly necessary, and I am a man of base instincts. So I promised myself I would not order another pork belly for, ooh, the next six months. Well, at least not for the next three. Whatever... I had to have this one.

The presence of that dish - and many others - on the menu at the Hartley, a gastropub on a rather less than lovely drag just south of London's Tower Bridge, was reassuring. (A couple of years ago I brazenly attempted to use this column to get a pub just down the road from my house in south London gastro-ed, but I failed.) Previously, the Hartley was a grimy old boozer with framed rugby shirts on the wall, frequented by a few blokes who would stand about the bar sucking on fags in what, for them, was God's waiting room. Now the walls have been stripped back to brick. There are hefty leather sofas, subtle lighting and a list of Kiwi and South African wines. It is a massive improvement, though the menu is a disappointment. By their own admission, many of the dishes are brought in from those mass-catering companies who pre-charcoal-grill chicken breasts, so the barbecue marks have a startling uniformity. It was proof, if proof were needed, that the gastropub can be as much a pre-packaged affair these days as faux Victorian boozers were in the Seventies.

The Hartley, with its red-painted walls, its half-open kitchen and its commitment to serious meats - great pork sourced from the Ginger Pig butchers, roast Longhorn beef on Sundays - is evidence that they can still be what they originally were: eccentric ventures of character, set up by people with a commitment to good food served outside the restaurant setting. No, it's not exactly pub food, but it has a solid, big-fisted feel which suits the solid, big-fisted surroundings.

So there are starters of garlic bruschetta with a slab of pungent Trysmore goat's cheese and some roasted tomatoes, or another of a thick, fibrous mix of white and brown crab meat on toast.

And then there was that pork dish. Sadly, the scallop element was off, but the rest was there. The pig's head came as fine chunks in a sauce of ripe, unctuous savouriness, the pork belly was a thick, sweetened, well-rendered strip and the champ and cabbage were in such abundance they looked like part of the landscape from a Hornby train set. A lamb tagine was only kinda: a lamb shank in a bowl of an almond-studded dark sauce, with a pungency that was just a little overwhelming. No matter. Its virtues outweighed its failings.

For pudding, I tried to order the lime mousse brulee because it sounded so awful, but it was off. Instead I had a roast banana in a sugar shell that recalled the Chinese restaurants of the Seventies (in a good way), with a sprinkling of pomegranate seeds and a scoop of fresh-tasting vanilla ice cream.

None of this is graceful or subtle food, but it is deeply attractive food, and well-priced, too. Now, I wonder if they'd like to set up a second outpost round the corner from my house? There's still an opening.