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Anna's Restaurant
THE success of a restaurant is a funny thing. Eighteen months ago, when Ken- nedy Brookes turned Bertorelli's in Char- lotte Street into le Café Italien, the whole point of it seemed to vanish. Everybody who went there regularly knew that the food would never be up to much, the reassuringly drab walls didn't aspire to `decor' and it wasn't even that cheap.
Anna, head waitress and not always benevolent director of the first floor, gave Bertorelli's much of its character; she had been there, after all, for 30 years. She is proud of having been called 'the rudest waitress in London' but, much as I should hate to upset her, I cannot think the title is deserved. I remember going there with an agonising headache and she was under- standing to the point of solicitousness when I ordered just a plate of mashed potato and a glass of ribena. Mind you, I wouldn't try it in her new place: luckily, Anna's vocifer- ous railing against the new set-up at Ber- torelli's gave a couple of her regulars the idea of setting her up in a restaurant of her own — Anna's Restaurant (636 1178) which, although just across the road from Bertorelli's, couldn't in fact be further away from it.
I expect the shareholders felt that a new• restaurant had to look New and so a designer from Milan was called in and has produced a harmonious little study in pink, grey and black with dramatic touches of marble and granite. This is not to say I don't like it. I do. Only, I feel that this is neither Anna's natural environment nor, that of the sort of customers she wants to attract. This is not an insurmountable problem, though, I'm sure.
The menu is another surprise. I would have thought it would have been more in the Bertorelli's line (the only Italian res- taurant I've ever been to which had bread and butter pudding on the menu), but the bias here is born-again English, which is to say French-influenced but not exclusively so. The chef, Paul Grindle, a Yorkshire- man who trained at the Savoy and has come here from The Box Tree at Ilkley where he was a sous-chef, is confident enough not to mind including several dishes which have become something of a cliché of the modern menu: a warm salad of lamb's kidneys with cashew nuts and pine kernels (which missed perfection only through slight meanness with the greenery) and the sautéed calf's liver in a shallot and blackcurrant sauce are a couple of obvious examples. Still, it is only lesser chefs who give this sort of menu a bad name. The scallops, marinated in lime and ginger, make an excellent starter: fresh and spikily sharp, though on the expensive side at £4.25. The main courses are well-judged and ingre- dients are treated with respect. The fillet steak Bearnaise and turbot in a light sauce flavoured with Noilly Prat were just as they should be. Puddings are exuberant but not excessive; neither the tarte aux pommes nor the light sponge pudding with a rasp- berry coulis should overwhelm you; the chocolate marquise with prunes soaked in brandy and in a creamy coffee sauce might. The selection of cheeses is unexceptional, but the cheeses themselves are good.
The only fault I'd find with the menu Is that there is nothing plain on it, but Anna has already planned to remedy this by adding, perhaps, cutlets and a steak. There is, however, a changing three-course set menu at lunchtime which tends more In that direction: melon or smoked trout, then sautéed kidneys with rice or grilled sardines with a sauce verte, followed by cheese or ice-cream, is the sort of thing you can expect — and not bad value at £11.75. The wine list has its eccentricities, an English wine, Breaky Bottom, at £6.95 and Jung's extra dry non-alcoholic wine at £4.10, the house wines are good value at £5.75, and there are a couple of pleasant Georges Duboeuf Cotes du Rhones at £6.20. The restaurant is good now and I feel that it'll only get better. It just needs to be broken in and mussed a bit. Dinner --- three courses with wine and a tip — won t, admittedly, cost much under £25 a head, but lunch will, and the mood is right.
Nigella Lawson
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