York & Albany, 127-129 Parkway, London NW1 (020 7388 3344). Meal for two, including wine and service, £120
I needed feeding. Not in the way I usually need feeding, which is simply to keep the grouchy, self-absorbed part of me at bay, but to soothe the wounded soul. My dear old mum had died – two weeks ago as you read this – and the choice of where to go mattered. What mattered most was whose food I should be eating. It needed to be someone whose instincts I trusted, whose cooking made sense. It had to be Angela Hartnett. You need only look at her to know she's the sort of woman you want putting a bowl of pasta in front of you when there is an imperative attached to eating. There is something redoubtable and reliable about her. She has prospered within the testosterone-drenched world of the Gordon Ramsay organisation, from which she has only just announced her departure.
As well as the Michelin-starred Murano in Mayfair, which she has purchased from Ramsay, there is the York & Albany, a boutique hotel in London's Camden with both a restaurant and a lovely deli, called Nonna's, where they serve salads that woodland animals could nest in and big hulking sandwiches while playing Neil Young and Nick Drake at you. She will continue to oversee the food until the end of the year. The deli is as self-conscious a piece of rustic chic as you could hope to find, but it works. It cannot be denied that, a couple of years into its life, the restaurant dining room next door is beginning to show its age. The grey-fabric wall covering is looking a bit scuffed and tatty. No worries. We sat with our backs to it.
Hartnett's food here is very much an extension of her personality. Sure she can do big and solid, but she also has technique by the gallon, which allows her to do serious stuff to ingredients while still retaining their essence. The most comforting of her starters, pumpkin tortelli with a beurre noisette and crisp sage leaves, may well be the sort of dish you want to get up to your armpits in. But that visceral appeal comes hand in hand with something else: an admiration for the pasta making and the acute seasoning of the pumpkin. It's spot on.
A more complex starter of watercress panna cotta with deep-fried oysters also delivers. Generally if you muck about with an ingredient as much as the watercress is played with here, something of itself is lost. But here it all was. The fat oysters survived the deep-fat fryer to still be very much themselves within their crisp panko-crumb coating. It's a wonderfully distracting dish, which is exactly what I needed.
Of the mains, the star was a hunk of slow-braised osso bucco, complete with glistening cylinder of marrow, on a thick puddle of wet polenta, the whole thing dressed with a meaty jus and some glazed Chantenay carrots – so you can pretend some of it is good for you. On the side, a bowl of pickled red cabbage, which reminded me of what we used to eat on Christmas Day. I paused over it, like Proust with his madeleine, only healthier. Against that, curls of lemon sole, accurately cooked, with pieces of seared octopus, a chorizo purée, the whole dressed with an anchovy vinaigrette, can't help but look a little knowing. Which is my way of saying it was girls' food.
We finished with an apple tarte Tatin with a scoop of tonka-bean ice cream. I have often been rude about Ramsay making the Tatin sisters' famous dish his signature. But in this context it works. Another dessert of a flapjack with slices of candied beetroot and a yogurt-and-raspberry sorbet was intriguing. There were cubes of chocolate fudge at the end and the sort of strong coffee you would expect of a chef like Hartnett, with her deep Italian roots. We ordered a glass of something sticky with which to toast Claire, and went back out into the cool of an autumn London day. I'm not honestly sure it was the sort of food my mum would have liked, but it was exactly what I wanted.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
