140 Newington Butts, London SE11 (020 7582 6800). Meal for two, including wine and service, £80
There is a sweet, knowing comedy to the Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec, a studied eccentricity which looks you coolly in the eye and challenges you to sneer. It could be no other way. The converted pub, on a less than lovely corner a crack pipe's throw from Elephant and Castle, is the offspring of the Lobster Pot, an equally eccentric fish restaurant next door. At the Lobster Pot, which celebrates its 20th anniversary next year, you are greeted upon opening the door by the sound of seagulls, and the slatboard-panelled room is designed to look like the inside of a fishing skiff, complete with portholes, behind which fish swim. The key there is the food, which is reliable in an unstinting, unmodernised, bourgeois way.
It is all an expression of its owner, Hervé Regent, who arrived in the middle of the dinner service at the Toulouse Lautrec wearing a black frock coat, a cowboy-style spaghetti string tie, with brilliantined hair, and the kind of moustache joke shops model theirs on. Voles could nest in it. The brasserie is a family affair. Front of house, in white jacket and American retro kipper tie, is the eldest son Nolan; in the kitchen, standing in for the middle brother on a quiet Monday night, is the soft-cheeked youngest son Oliver. No matter that he only graduated from catering college in July. They are the Regent boys; ergo this is what they do.
For the most part they do it well. The food is not earth shattering, but it has a reliable Gallic heft which is reassuring. On the menu cauliflower soup is first referred to as Crème du Barry – Comtesse du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, was obsessed by cauliflower – and the dishes are rich with the likes of duck confit, chicken livers and sauces mounted with enough cream to put a herd of Friesians on overtime. Menu pricing is meant to be simple, but is actually hideously complicated: starters are listed at £6 and mains at £16, however two courses is £20 and three courses £25. Except a bunch of things carry supplements. Order a dozen snails in garlic butter and it's an extra £4.50. I made my companion, who bought me in a charity auction for £200 – God knows what possessed him – order the dozen so I could have some.
To my slight disappointment they came without shells in a stoneware dimpled dish; digging your tongue around the crusted nooks of the shells has always struck me as part of the joy. From the specials, roasted field mushrooms and bacon served on a toasted muffin with a fried duck egg was essentially breakfast for dinner.
A duck confit parmentier, alongside a boned quail stuffed with cayenne-spiced black pudding, was much more a potato cake than a potato-topped stew. We'll let that pass because this was the kind of food you expect from a French restaurant in Kennington run by a man in a shoestring tie called Hervé. It came with a mushroom crème sauce and for a while Hervé stood by our table musing that what it really lacked as a dish was chestnuts.
Hervé is a man who does not understand the meaning of enough. It didn't need chestnuts. Best of all was a very good côte de boeuf, served with truly crunchy chips and a Béarnaise sauce we watched Oliver make.
Desserts – a crème brûlée, a cherry and almond tart – were not a strong point, but at least there was a list of cheaply priced good wines.
Upstairs is a bar area with a small stage boasting a white baby grand, where a trio played (well) through dinner. Monday is jazz jam night and so, as we ate, we watched a parade of dour-looking musicians carrying sax and guitar cases through the restaurant to engage in musical combat. As we ate dessert, a singer was brutalising "I Get a Kick Out of You". After that things perked up, and that's how the evening ended, tucked around a table listening to some rather good jazz musicians taking each other on. Dinner and a show: it really can't be beat.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
