46 Brewer Street, London W1 (020 7096 2096). Meal for two, including wine and service, £120
Mele e Pere means "apples and pears" and, unwittingly, the name is apt, for there is a certain neither-one-thing-nor-the-other mood about the place. It is a prime central London restaurant, with a bill to match, which manages to deliver a neighbourhood vibe. It is a loose-limbed neighbourhood joint upon which the baggage of its West End location weighs heavily. You can eat some nice things here. But you can also eat things that make you wonder what they were thinking.
I expected something a little more consistent. The chef, Andrea Mantovani, was previously head chef at Arbutus, a few streets over in Soho. There are a growing number of places like Arbutus turning up now, but when it arrived in 2006 (later to be joined by sister restaurants Wild Honey and Les Deux Salon) it was a low-key revelation: really good, classy food, with no stupid service flummery, lots of wines by the glass and half carafe and a bill that doesn't make you feel like you're paying off the national debt of a bankrupt Balkan nation. I am regularly asked to recommend a reasonably priced quality place, and invariably Arbutus and its siblings are on the list.
Mele e Pere isn't quite ready to join them. Partly it's the space. The ground-floor, over-lit reception with its huge displays of glass apples and pears lends a little too much formality to the whole experience. It feels like arriving at an over-blinged private bank. Downstairs is a large basement room which is slightly hard and chilly, less in temperature than mood. The menu is, as the name suggests, Italian, but very much in a think-you-you-cope-with-us? sort of way. There is very little in the way of comfort food. Octopus, fennel and blood-orange salad or hand-chopped (raw) veal or grilled razor clams or tripe – which amounts to half the starters – are hardly crowd pleasers. From a list of what I imagine are supposed to be canapés, deep-fried olives stuffed with a little chilli are a dense, ripe pleasure. Snails served in their shells in the bourguignon style, with pecorino and parsley, feel like a non sequitur. The crumbled Italian cheese does not give an Italian spin to this most French of dishes.
A starter of sweet, soft, red Sicilian prawns with a fresh dice of carrots, tomatoes and onions gets a big thumbs-up. A tripe stew with grated parmesan is simply not all there. It has all the musky, deep stickiness that you get from long-braised cow's stomach, but the sauce is just too sugary. Tripe cooked like this needs a big, bold peppery kick and this didn't have it. (Simon Hopkinson makes a brilliantly fiery tripe stew; he once gave me a Tupperware box of it as a thank you for taking him on a review. Witness my wonderful life!)
The one self-conscious lurch towards comfort was the appearance among the pasta dishes of that discredited old stager spaghetti alla carbonara, which these days you are more likely to find as a pasta option on a Pizza Hut menu, where it will slip effortlessly from mouth to the already furred linings of your arteries. I wanted to be reminded exactly why it could be a classic, and I wasn't, not quite. When you start picking around for the bits of crisped bacon as though they are a reward, something is up. It should be luscious, intense and, courtesy of the raw egg used to make the sauce, very rich. This was dry; Italian chefs have been shot for less. Another dish of rabbit with carrots and black olives had a great big depth of flavour, but was also, as bunny can be, dry in places.
We finished with a warm, frothy zabaglione which lacked a boozy kick. Apple tart with cinnamon ice cream was better. Best of all was a single scoop of Amalfi lemon sorbet, a little dish of sunshine. With a couple of pear bellinis and a £28 bottle of bog-standard Chianti we were staring at a £135 bill, which is a lot of money for a meal that does not leave you patting your tummy contentedly and giving thanks to the gods of Italian cooking. It's easy to see that the kitchen can do better than this, can be more reliable and pleasing. Frankly, it had better be all of those things, and soon, because it's trading in a very crowded, unforgiving market.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
