Le Bouchon Bordelais, 5-9 Battersea Rise, London SW11 (020 7738 0307). Meal for two, including wine and service, £80
Snails in garlic butter. Steak frites. Profiteroles. Let me repeat: snails baked in garlicky butter, the shells crusted with chopped parsley; steak cooked au point, seared without, purple within, chips and luscious bearnaise on the side; profiteroles of the lightest choux pastry, filled with a vanilla cream rich enough to invite the sanction of law. Just the sound of those dishes makes me feel warm in all the right places. I'm almost moved to make like Julie Andrews and give you a few choruses of 'My Favourite Things', but it might frighten the children. This is the problem, and the obscenity, of the job that I do: it cultures gastronomic ennui, much as babies culture colds. Yes, I have been thrilled by the promise of millefeuille of duck gizzard with chorizo-spiked puy lentils, say, or fillet of sea bass with oyster caramel dressing, pan-fried fiddleheads and shiitake mushrooms. Salt and pepper quail? Yes please. Crispy pig's spleen? Bring it on. But, inevitably, there comes a time when I crave the basics. It might be less than politically correct to say this, perhaps even grossly eurocentric, but in the restaurant game first position is the French bistro. Everything else derives from there. (No, really: according to Rebecca Spang's scholarly study The Invention of the Restaurant, the very first was opened in Paris by Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in 1766.) Le Bouchon Bordelais in Battersea is a good French bistro, or at least, it is now. It hasn't always been this way. For a long while the food at this bar and restaurant and at its nearby sister, Le Bouchon Lyonnaise, was as ersatz as the nicotine-stained paint on the walls. The menus read right but they didn't always eat right. Recently, though, something wonderful happened. Le Bouchon Bordelais acquired a new partner in the business, Michel Roux, chef-patron of Le Gavroche in London's Mayfair. The Roux name is about as good as it gets in matters of British-French restaurants. It's like getting Wayne Rooney in to player-manage a bunch of Conference wannabes. Le Gavroche, opened in the Sixties by Michel's father and uncle, is as classy an operation as you can hope to find in Britain, making a virtue of the essentials done properly. Michel Roux Jnr has brought the same sensibility (though neither the complexity nor the prices) to bear on what is, essentially, a suburban operation. One of his former head chefs, Eric Landeau, is at the stove. Now the menu both reads right and eats right. I don't need to tell you what I had because it is there in the first line and it was as lovely as it sounds. The chips could have spent another 30 seconds in the fat, but I will forgive them this for the completely reliable execution of everything else. My wife had a starter of scallops in a light wine-based sauce, in an open puff-pastry case baked with care and precision, then leg of lamb with green beans and dauphinois potatoes, and a plate of perfectly kept cheeses to finish. The meat was of the very highest quality and the pricing fair: £5-8 for starters, £12-15 for all main courses, save for the Chateaubriand and cote de boeuf at £34 each for two, which passed by on their carving boards, shyly surrendering the pink. My appetite for braised squirrel and crispy pig's spleen will come back, but for now, steak and chips does it for me.
