Divo, 7.25/10 (0.75 for utterly enchanting service)
Telephone: 020-7484 1355
Address: 12 Waterloo Place, London SW1
Open: All day, Mon-Fri, noon-11pm; Sat, 6-11pm
So powerful is the grip of atavistic loyalty as it stretches down the ages and across the seas that I could not bring myself to review the Ukrainian restaurant Divo when it opened last autumn. Especially not in light of its receiving some of the most monstrous reviews a central London newcomer has earned since a stupendously dreadful clip joint, W'Sens (the least pretentious thing about it was the name), opened in the same grand building near Piccadilly a few years earlier.
Divo's critical mauling raised the intriguing question of whether a restaurant can inherit the traits of its predecessor on the site, much as recipients of transplanted organs are said to exhibit the donor's characteristics.
Six months on, it seems the Odessa catering firm that owns the place took note. They, like the noted Seattle radio psychiatrist Dr Frase Ukraine, were listening - so gone are the folksy costumes worn by staff, gone the tourist films playing on gilt-framed plasma screens, and gone the other grimly laughable, thematic touches. Even the chicken Kiev that drew such brutal derision has vanished from the menu. In fact, at first glance it seemed they had almost entirely abandoned the regional cuisine in favour of one of those studiedly inoffensive, pan-continental menus (hither a dash of feta, thither a boudin blanc) that tend to presage disaster.
Only when alerted to my own Odessan roots - "Oh my God, I hear Cossack horses," I shrieked at my friend, mistaking the sound of the coffee machine for neighing. "Load up the cart: we must leave the village at once" - did our incredibly charming Belarussian waitress bring over the secret menu headed "Specialities from Russia, Georgia and Ukraine".
Even then, we expected the worst, not least because the room (colour scheme of golds and ochres, oodles of swagging and tassel-laden curtains, high-backed, ornate chairs, ersatz chandeliers - presumably some confused soul's notion of imperial Tsarist splendour) is clearly designed to appeal to mafiosi expats for whom the traditional challenge of choosing dishes is reduced to a brusque, "Bring me a magnum of Cristal and a medium-sized bucket of Beluga."
If I were a rich man, I would have ordered caviar myself. Instead, I began with - what else? - borsch, and was relieved to find it an unusually light and classy, if slightly sweet, version of that beetroot soup, curiously but pleasingly suffused with chunks of brisket and kidney beans, and served with soured cream and a pampushki (bread roll) shaped after a Grimm brothers cottage in the woods.
My friend's herring salad, moulded together with sections of beetroot, boiled egg and mayonnaise beneath a top layer of egg to resemble a mescaline user's notion of a Neapolitan ice cream, was amazingly good. "I'm amazed," he said, as if to confirm the point. "This is really delicious."
We also shared a tri-pickled starter of cucumber, red cabbage and tomato with dill. While vinegarised tomato should be used only as an instrument of torture, the cucumber - a twist on that garlicky prince of all pickled cukes, the New Green - was great.
Playing on the stereo during the inter-course hiatus was Grover Washington's Just The Two Of Us, which appeared to be someone's idea of a mischievous joke, because at this stage in the proceedings, until a lone gentleman sidled in, just the two of us constituted the entire clientele. But whatever the explanation for the lack of custom that lunchtime, the quality of the cooking had nothing to do with it.
My verniki, Ukrainian dumplings variously filled with potato, cabbage and minced veal, were plump, delicate and full of fun. The highlight, however, were my friend's deruni, potato pancakes stuffed with creamed mushrooms, a savoury classic that drew a spontaneous, "Quick, quick, you must have a taste - these are fantastically good."
Both puddings - that timeless Ukrainian classic Bramley apple crumble with custard, and a Napoleon cake in which yet more pancakes had been rolled around vanilla custard, mint and orange - were excellent, too.
The room, for all its exaggerated naffery, is oddly relaxing, and in another life we would have been happy to pass the afternoon knocking back flavoured vodkas, singing folk songs about being sick with loneliness by the banks of the Danube, and generally living it up like gentlemen of leisure in the good old days back home.
Divo means "marvel" in the tongue of the mother country, and though this place isn't quite that, it is one of those rare restaurants that wishes only to please. Anyone who thinks of eastern European cuisine as inevitably lumpen and overbearing will find it quite a revelation. I wouldn't hang around, though. That credit crunch is poised to bring about a revolution in the survival rates of sparsely populated restaurants with crushing London overheads, one that will, one has to assume, be anything but velvet.
The bill
Herring salad £10
Borsch £9
Pickled cucumber, cabbage
and tomato £6
Verniki £13
Deruni pancakes £12
Napoleon cake £6
Apple crumble £6
Bottle Loredena Pinot Noir, US £30
2 glasses pinot noir £15
Filter coffee £3
Subtotal £110
Service @ 12.5% £13.75
Total £123.75
