I f you're led up with deep-fried camem- bert with gooseberry
sauce, duck breasts with elderflower fritters and kiwi with everything, go the the Ark. Their honest French cooking is infinitely reliable. There are, in fact, two Ark restaurants. The one to go to is just off Kensington High Street, going towards Kensington Square. Its near relation in Palace Gardens Terrace is not a patch on it.
Their regular (a la carte) menu is always the same, though there is a changing list of plats du jour. Of their first courses, the snails are fat and succulent and you're given unlimited amounts of crusty baguette to soak up with. Their French onion soup is authentic and worth ordering if you can wait long enough to eat it without burning your tongue, and the quenelles sauce Nan- tua — turkey mousseline with lobster sauce — tastes as good as it smells. My favourite starter, not just of this menu but of any menu anywhere, I think, is the pied de porc ravigote — pigs trotters, slightly warm, with a sauce of chopped onion and hard- boiled egg and capers. The soft crunch of warm fat and cartillage is not to everyone's liking, but I love it. If they've got their saucissonl a rail (which comes hot and whole rather than cold and sliced) on their daily menu, do choose it. Oysters, when they're on, are £2.95 a half-dozen, rather less than the average restaurant price. Most starters are cooked in cream or butter or both, it is true, but there are always some plain things. Talk to the waiter or waitress if you want something un-sauced; it is a restaurant which tries to please its customers.
Main dishes are robust and the portions large. You couldn't, 'thank goodness, call them 'interesting', but their ingredients always taste fresh. My favourites are the gigot d'agneau rad aux flageolets and foie de veeau Provencale — the softest, mous- siest calves liver cooked with butter and garlic. Their other regular plates include truite saumonee grillee Maitre d'Hatel, poussin rati au romarin, balottine de volail- le au citron, escalope de veau aux champig- nons and filet au poivre, which, at £6.85, is by far and away the most expensive thing on the menu. Vegetables are £1 extra, but the selection is generous.
If, after all this, and the portions really are substantial, you want a pudding, try the Mont Blanc or fresh fruit sorbets but avoid the creme bruMe. Their house wine is very good value at £4.45, and even on an extravagant night the bill rarely goes above about £28 for two. Service is capable and charming: Juan Molina must be one of the best head waiters in London.
If the solidly reliable charms of the Ark don't appeal and you want to eat a lot for next to nothing, you could go to the only Brazilian restaurant in London, Paulos in Greyhound Road. There is a modest list of four starters: milho cozido, corn on the cob with garlic butter; sin i na concha, a scallop shell filled with a tomatoey crab gratin; sopa do dia, or soup of the day, which, if you're in luck, could be their glossy black bean soup; and that well- known Brazilian dish, coquetel de camarao — prawn cocktail.
But there's really no need to have a starter, since for the main course there is a buffet table covered with about 20 dishes of which you can eat as much as you want for £6.20. Heavy metal trays like we used to have at school are filled to overflowing with ensopadinho — a highly seasoned beef stew, angu a Bahiana — cornmeal with minced beef, xuxu — a marrow-like vegetable cooked with tomato — hunks of cold roast pork and a peppery chicken casserole.
Two of their most delicious specialities are vatapa (from the north-east of Brazil), a purée, or mish-mash, 'of peanuts, cashews, coconut, prawns and palm oil, and farofa, a couscous-like dish of manioc root flour cooked with olives, peppers, eggs and onions.
The rest of the buffet is an F-planner's paradise: bowls of rice, hot and in a nutty salad; beans of all colours; shredded raw vegetables; pasta; and platefuls of various fibrous and crunchy salads.
You're unlikely to want pudding, but you can choose from eight, all at 85p. The mango cream is delicious, but some of the others taste rather liked sweetened, still- wet papier-mache as far as I'm concerned. I'm told, however, that quimdiam, a coco- nut sponge with cream caramel, is good, but only, I'd have thought, for the sweet- toothed. Paulos is unlicensed but there is no corkage — or try their mango juice. You could stock up here for at least a week on well under £10 a head, but it may be unwise to go if you can't lip-read.
Nigella Lawson
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