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NORMALLY, I am suspicious of 'cheap' restaurants — a drastic cut in quality to save £5 on the bill is not a very good deal, though the usual one. Eating out simply is expensive over here (and increasingly so on the Continent, too). Certainly, though, it shouldn't be assumed that high prices ensure anything about the cooking. Now that food has become just another fashion- able accessory, most care and money is spent in kitting kitchen and dining-room out comme it faut: it would appear that a hexagonal plate in the right place can count for more than routine culinary skills.
Unfortunately, cheap restaurants often try for the same effect, when really their ambitions should be quite different (as whose shouldn't?) There is absolutely no- thing to be gained by serving up poor men's versions of recipes which to be authentic require expensive ingredients or elaborate preparation; to a certain extent, all restaurants tend towards this over here, but it still should not be encouraged.
Not surprisingly, then, it is not often one is able to recommend a restaurant in London where the starters cost £1.35 and the main courses £3.75. If North London is your beat, or you don't mind going teetotal and driving, La Bougie (485 6400) in Murray Street, NW1, could be just the thing. Vikki Leffman (who used to be a buyer for Marks & Sparks and now runs the show here) and Ahmed Kharshom (who cooks) opened ten months ago to try and provide good, honest food at afford- able prices. Well, they have succeeded. The menu flirts with fashion in a way I don't wholly approve of, but generally they produce a markedly good-value, eclectic, though basically Franglais, menu.
To start with, there is a choice of home-made soup (fennel when I went, and I'm afraid nothing to write home about); blinis saumon, in fact not a blini, but a pancake with salmon marinaded in dill and lemon, with a blob of fromage blanc and the odd pink peppercorn; the tranchette de brie, deep-fried brie — my culinary bete noire — with blackcurrant conserve; the old favourite, moules mariniere; veal satay; the beguilingly named poulet Laut- rec, a sort of milk feuilles of oyster mushrooms, smoked chicken and pine nuts; choux royale, seafood vol-au-vent with hollandaise sauce; and avocado filled with a yoghurt and green peppercorn dressing. I think of these the best choice is the `blinis'. I like marinaded salmon a hundred times better than smoked salmon, anyway, and the whole dish has a pleasant- ly Scandinavian (rather than Russian) fla- vour to it. The veal satay was excellent, its peanut sauce not as spicy as you might expect, and if you like garlic the seafood vol-au-vent with an, admittedly vinegary, hollandaise is good and very filling.
Next you can have calves liver in a mustard sauce; poussin in a creamy garlic sauce; a crispy pancake filled with seasonal vegetables; veal escalope in a cream and tarragon sauce; fresh fish of the day; salmon in a light red wine and shallot sauce; chicken stir-fried with spring onion, ginger and sake; and lamb in a 'fragrantly light' rosemary sauce. Here I should advise the stir-fried chicken, which comes in a little lacquer bowl and is unimprovable. The salmon was just that bit on the dry side and the lamb — three, very small, cutlets — was fine but no more. But this isn't Tante Claire and one shouldn't, without meaning to be in any way patronising, expect too much.
If you've got a sweet tooth, you are, however, in for a treat. At £1.35 each, there is a choice of passion-fruit bridee, gateau mousse chocolat, lime and rum syllabub, profiteroles, zabaglione (and the right real thing), sorbets, or cheese.
The only fault I have to find is with their habit of Frenchifying everything. There is really no need — or call — to insist, for example, on panier vegetarien for their no-meat crispy pancake — or on any of it. Describing something in French does not make it taste better; nor is it appropriate.
The only other drawback is the place's popularity. Even on a Wednesday evening it was packed — it is a very small, style of '81, room and North Londoners (leather jackets and haystack haircuts much in evidence) seem to go around in large and noisy groups.
But it is extraordinarily good value: with house wine at £4.50 a bottle (and perfectly all right) and coffee with pieces of choco- late fudge at 60p, you can eat amply for a minimum outlay. There aren't many places where you can eat a three course meal for under £10 a head.
Nigella Lawson
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