161 Bellenden Road, London SE15 (020 3302 8200). Meal for two, including wine and service: £80

I did resist going to Artusi. It's in Peckham, near where I live, and I do hate being accused of laziness. Then I read the menu. It was full of things I wanted to eat: big reliable ingredients treated with the minimum of fuss. Salted anchovies were involved. If salted anchovies are involved it's generally a good thing. The restaurant had been described to me as an Italian and, in as much as there was a pasta and a risotto dish on the short menu, I could see this was so. But it read as something else: it was nowness in a little over a dozen dishes.

Menus can do this. They can capture a moment in time. Rowley Leigh's menu from Kensington Place with its seared scallops and minted pea purée would have told you all you needed to know about how we ate in restaurants in 1987. Fergus Henderson's St John menu of roasted bone marrow and grilled chitterlings with mustard did the same job for the 90s. Likewise, Artusi is all very 2014. It's smart and keenly priced. It's ever-changing and ingredient-led and very big on nouns: it's a menu that understands we no longer need our dinner "laid on beds" or "nestled" with each other or "partnered", like the ingredients haven't so much been cooked as gone dogging.

With Artusi, however, it's not just the menu. It's the whole proposition. There's the chef, James Beer, who worked previously at the Clove Club in east London. There's the pared-back decor, of slate-grey ceiling and white walls, and unadorned tables and a open kitchen. The waiters and cooks have beards. Of course they do. And then there's the location in Peckham. I made much of this in my review last year of the Peckham Refreshment Rooms: the way there are no longer no-go areas for restaurants, that surplus and plenty can sit side by side. In truth it's about a patchwork of the moneyed and unmoneyed. Artusi is in the fancy bit of Peckham, to which the word "village" has been appended by hormonally charged estate agents. They have a middle-class butchers on Bellenden Road called Flock and Herd – the sort where you "source" your ingredients instead of buying them. No more needs to be said.

There have been a few openings around here since the Peckham Refreshment Rooms that I have resisted, just as I have with new places in Brixton and Camberwell because I am supposed to be a national restaurant critic, and I hate the abuse. It doesn't matter how often I review in Glasgow or Manchester or, God help me, Cowes. I'll still get a kicking for reviewing nearby. Which is completely unfair.

It's not my fault my neighbourhood happens right now to be where some of the most interesting restaurants in Britain are opening. It's not my fault they're leading the way. It just happens to be so. If I could find places like Artusi in Leicester or Droitwich or Nuneaton I would holler about it from the rooftops. But I can't. Artusi is in Peckham. Near where I live. Deal with it.

The menu, scribbled up on a blackboard (and posted online), is divided among five small plates at a fiver each, three pasta/risotto dishes in small and large sizes and three mains, the latter at £14. There are four of us, so we order most of it. A platter of prosciutto and mortadella is just that: a generous plateful of finely sliced charcuterie. There's a slab of long-cooked pig's head that has been pressed and then fried until the meat is the colour of copper and rust, with a deep-green, blitzed salsa verde, so that you get soft meat and rough salty, acidic sauce and create a Jackson Pollock on the plate in the process.

Slices of ox heart – the Vin Diesel of muscles – have merely been seared so that the outsides are dark and the insides bloody and iron rich. These are scattered with the salty, brassic tang of crushed olives. There is a salad of finely sliced winter tomatoes to remind you that summer is coming, with peaks of soft whipped ricotta. Grilled pieces of skin-on mackerel come with the sweetest, most juvenile petals of raw globe artichoke dressed with the freshest of  peppery olive oils. Most of this isn't so much cooking as an expression of extremely good taste.

There are broad, silky ribbons of pappardelle as a standard bearer for the Italian label, with a ragu of lamb shoulder cooked down and down until only the deep flavour of the meat is there to remind you of the animal it once was. There is a crisp-skinned fillet of gilthead bream, with bracing tendrils of monk's beard and a light beurre blanc.

Leg of lamb, again tasting sturdily of itself, is roasted to pink, sliced and served with spinach and sprouting broccoli. Hunks of onglet, that most serious cut of beef for grown-ups who still have the right number of teeth, come with proper roast potatoes and a sauce that is the essence of the meat that made it. Everything is supremely self-confident. The ingredients are good. The kitchen knows what it's doing. Gimmicks are unnecessary.

There are only two desserts: a moist olive oil cake with a scoop of salted honey ice cream, and their own strawberry ice cream with an authentic mastic elasticity served in a pool of sweet vermouth – a smart idea. We spoon away greedily. The wine list is short and, it transpires, littered with "natural" wines. To his credit, our waiter is determined not to back down in the face of my eye-rolling over this, even though the prosecco has all the elegance and style of a knackered Peckham lock-up.

It has that classic "natural" raw tang which does indeed take you closer to the grape; close enough that I can see all the blemishes and want to run away again. He finds a white that is softer and warmer for being produced using all that dreadful human ingenuity pressed into the service of making fermented grape juice taste nice. Later he asks us to taste a "natural" red which we agree is drinkable, though not at 15% alcohol. If I wanted a headache in a glass I'd order a Jägermeister and be done with it. In other words, unless you are in thrall to the cult of natural, be careful with the wine list. Everything else at Artusi does what it says on the menu. And it does so bloody well. Lucky old Peckham, eh?

Jay's news bites

■ In many ways Artusi feels like south London's answer to the marvellous Trullo, which was opened in Highbury in June 2010 by graduates of the River Café and Jamie Oliver's 15. It's also a neighbourhood restaurant, but one which punches well above its weight: pastas are made by hand shortly before service, and terrific cuts of meat and fish are grilled over charcoal (trullorestaurant.com)

■ The airline Blue Islands, which runs services from Guernsey and Jersey to London City has hired local Michelin-starred chef Shaun Rankin of the Ormer in St Helier to create a menu of "locally sourced" deli produce. Of course it will only actually be locally sourced at take off in the Channel Islands. By landing at London City Airport the stuff will have flown a long way (blueislands.com)

■ Kitchen porters are often regarded as the lowest of the low in restaurants, even though the places would collapse without them. After the success of the first Kitchen Porter of the Year competition last year, the search is on once more… (catererand hotelkeeper.co.uk)

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1