I DON'T know what came over me that day. I
never intended it to happen. But my normally mild-mannered, tolerant self, hav- ing gaily gambolled clear down Ebury Street, stepped into Il Convivio as some- body else. Look out Pimlico/Belgravia bor- ders, Mr Stroppy was coming to dinner.
Maybe it was the caviare and champagne which unhinged me. We had been to the 90th birthday party of the Goring Hotel, where they were generous with the Pol Roger and the sevruga caviare. Gauging how much of the not-quite-black stuff it is polite to eat when it is piled up in buckets is a stressful business. Too little and you have wasted a rare opportunity. Too much and your poverty and greed are announced. Temptation was great. This was the good stuff. Every egg was intact, firm but not hard, and utterly distinct from its brethren.
I thought I heard each tiny particle giggle as it tiptoed down my throat. To eat caviare with sour cream and blinis is little better than putting it in a sandwich with sausage and ketchup. From what I could make out in the dark, the split-level dining-room of Il Convivio, a new Italian on the site of the former Mijanou, seemed quite smart, in the anodyne fashion of modern west London Italians. The menu was conventionally arranged, £17.50 for two courses, £20 for three, £23 for four. Even with a liberal sprinkling of surcharges, this was potentially good value. It was time to order. 'I would like the black pasta, followed by the monkfish, followed by the rabbit, please,' I said. But it was not to be. This was not, as the head waiter explained in an even voice, what was meant by four courses. With a meat and a fish dish, I had selected two main courses. This would incur a 'large sup- plement' (£10). Enter Mr Stroppy. 'But that is not what it says here,' I reasoned, 'it just says "£23 for four courses". It doesn't men- tion any restrictions or surcharges. You have offered me four courses for sale at this price, and I mean to have them.'
`It may not say it there,' he kept replying as I kept reiterating my point, 'but I'm telling you now. If you want two main cours- es, you have to pay extra.' After much press- ing (believe me), I eventually relented and abandoned the rabbit. Half a kilo of caviare under my belt, I wasn't really hungry any- way. And, of course, Il Convivio was using a perfectly standard format. But it is one which has always annoyed me because it is, at best, linguistically lazy, and, at worst, con- veniently misleading. Restaurants have no right to give the impression that their pricing structures are disarmingly simple and laid- back if in fact they are so Byzantine as to be unprintable. The head waiter took it all with great aplomb, while obviously awarding me 0 marks out of 100 on his 'customers I will be happy to see again' scale. The middle- aged couple at the table next door were out- raged on his behalf. They were bent on a resolutely uncritical evening of `Oh darling, isn't it just wonderful'; so having to listen to a neighbouring oik arguing dogmatically about money was a nightmare. At one point the poor man was so overwhelmed that he emitted an involuntary 'Oh dear'. I suspect he didn't do so very often. Then I couldn't find any red wine on the list. The sommelier pointed out that the reds were printed in a separate booklet from the whites, both of which were tucked, extreme- ly pointlessly, into a third, larger wallet. Hav- ing reflected, I called him back to ask whether the Marchese di Villamarina 1993 Sella e Mosca, which was listed as 'Cabernet Sauvignon/Franc', was one, the other, or both. He told me that it was Sardinian (which I knew). Then he said it was both, but failed to explain the difference, in which case, between 'Cabernet Sauvignon/Franc' and the heading below, 'Cabernet blending'.
I didn't mind that he wasn't very convincing, but could see that by this time I had been marked out as an awkward customer. I ordered it anyway, and was rewarded. Ele- gant, dry, surprisingly austere, it was good value (at £43) for a big Italian red in SW1.
Not that I complained about the food. Black spaghetti was freshly made and cooked more nicely at dente than is common, while the chunks of lobster in the sauce were less rubberily overdone than usual. I liked the (unadvertised) spice in the sauce, but the chilli was so dominant as to make my dish taste indistinguishable from my wife's crab and asparagus tagliolini, in which its pres- ence was also a surprise. Mrs Simon objected — on aesthetic, not health grounds — to the fantastic excess of butter sloshing around both of our plates. And, indeed, it did seem a strange mix: north Italian overindulgence with the butter, but a very southern hand on the chillies. The chef is German.
Baby monkfish wrapped in bacon with a mustard-seed sauce was okay. It was the first time I'd had lotte au lard' in eight years, since a memorable hotel terrace in Cassis where the monkfish was so old and so grey that the memory still makes me feel queasy. This was much better: aroma, tex- ture and taste were all beyond even my complaining. On the other hand, I am increasingly of the view that if fish is not brilliant, it's boring. Mrs Simon proved too delicate to take a main course. But for pud- ding she had apple compote, gratinded with coconut and served with a caramel sauce. She said it was just like your mother used to make, assuming you grew up in Basingstoke in the early Seventies, and your mother col- lected recipes from Woman's Weekly. House speciality white espresso ice cream was what it said — a modest boast, Petits fours were predictable but good value.
We ended as we had begun, by complain- ing. I whinged that they had charged us for two bottles of water (£3.50 each), the sec- ond of which we had neither ordered nor touched. They took them both off the bill with the weary air of people desperate for Mr Difficult and his wife just to pay and leave. We did. Never, I think, to return. At the moment (it opened last September) Il Convivio is good value. The food is perfect- ly reasonable, the surroundings pleasant, the ambience fine and the staff profession- al. But I didn't like it. Just call me awkward.
II Convivio, .143 Ebury St, London SWI; tel:• 020 7730 4099. £40 per head.
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