61 Rupert Street, London W1. No booking. Meal for two, including wine and service, £80
You don't need to be drunk to eat at Spuntino, but it helps. Everything about the place – the food, the fully inked staff, the u-shaped counter-top all the better for slumping upon – is engineered for people who've downed a skinful. I would describe it as effortlessly cool, were it not for the obvious effort that has clearly gone into achieving the effect: the distressed, glazed tiled walls, the way the low-wattage lights dangle, the seemingly anonymous frontage with the name scribbled off to one side. There is no telephone number. They do not take reservations. You have to know what it is to know what it is.
By rights, therefore, I should absolutely hate this place, like I hated those kids at school who made drainpipes look good, when they made me look like Max Wall. But I don't, and that's because the food, most of which costs around £5 a go, delivers on its promise.
Spuntino is the third venture from the team behind Polpo and Polpetto, which offer small plates of northern Italian food. This, however, is an American diner, the sort of place you would find right now in Brooklyn. It is a shameless act of cultural larceny, executed with love.
Last week my colleagues on this magazine had the brass neck to describe the Spuntino truffled egg toast as their "Most Wanted" item. I'll be the judge of that, I thought. Bloody hell, but they're right: a thick slab of white bread, layered with melted cheese and smeared with truffle oil, and in the middle a leaking egg yolk. The arteries harden. The vodka-flushed stomach settles. The lips become slippery as you eat. I'm sure that, given half a chance, the Department of Health would rope this one dish off as a crime scene. Deep-fried olives, stuffed with anchovy and sage, are saltiness squared. But what's a little hypertension between friends?
Then there are the sliders, the three-bite burgers in a soft sweet bun: ground beef with nuggets of bone marrow, lamb with pickled cucumber or, best of all, a hunk of salt beef with dill pickle and a slap of mustard. Oy and vey. We liked a deep-fried soft-shell crab, and a heap of shoestring fries like a bird's nest and mixed greens spiked with chilli. Only the mac and cheese missed the mark. It was rich and chewy with a fine crust, but completely under-seasoned. No matter: at the end there was their take on the peanut-and-jelly sandwich, two triangles of iced peanut-butter parfait with a lot of the red stuff. That last dish alone makes the inevitable drunken half-hour wait for a seat at the counter worthwhile.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
