Restaurant Review

Prince among menus

Before he has even tasted the steak tartare, the choucroute garni or the wonderfully retro sherry trifle, the menu at Rowley Leigh's new Bayswater restaurant is enough to make Jay Rayner swoon

Le Cafe Anglais, 8 Porchester Gardens, London W2 (020 7221 1415)

Meal for two, including wine and service, £110

A restaurant is more than a menu. A restaurant is the menu and the room in which it is eaten, the glassware and the napery, the waiters and the buzz, and the sense of wellbeing you get from being there. Or at least most restaurants are. Le Cafe Anglais is different. It really is first and foremost a menu, a beautifully written one. It is poetry in four dozen dishes. If all you had to guide you were the words on the card you would want to be there. It is swoon- and dribble-worthy. Or, to put it another way, if I showed you the menu and you didn't do at least a little swooning and dribbling I would know we could never be friends.

Not that it doesn't have all the other stuff. Le Cafe Anglais has a room - a lovely broad one, as it happens - with curving grey leather banquettes and pale-amber boxy lampshades in the Art Deco style, which give the place the feel of a luxury liner's ballroom. You do not feel that you are actually in a space on the corner of the unlovely Whiteley's shopping centre off London's Queensway. There are cheery waiters and an open kitchen which is home to not one but two huge rotisseries, for the roasting of chickens, ribs of beef and anything else made of muscle, bone and a ribbon of fat. But by far the most important feature of that kitchen is the lugubrious man leading it, Rowley Leigh - two words which, by themselves, promise you will eat well.

Leigh is one of a group of smart, bookish middle-class boys - think Alastair Little, Simon Hopkinson and Fergus Henderson - responsible for establishing a style of French bistro-influenced modern British cooking, without which eating out in this country would be a much sadder affair. They are all good at identifying what makes a dish work. They have impeccable taste, and none more so than Leigh. For nearly 20 years he cooked at Kensington Place, where dishes like his seared scallops with minted-pea puree won him battalions of regular fans. Now he has his own joint, and the tables are full.

Let me describe that menu in detail, for it is a thing of beauty. It starts with a list of aperitifs, as a good dinner really should: there are White Ladys and Bloody Marys. There are martinis and sherries and a few interesting ones without booze if you are the designated driver.

But below that, under hors d'oeuvres, is where the fun really starts. It reads as if Leigh has spent the past few months reacquainting himself with the eternal verities of Larousse and Robert Carrier and the unpreachy bits of Elizabeth David. So here is mortadella with celeriac remoulade and oeuf en gelle, and kipper pâté with soft-boiled egg. And yes of course there are modern touches - mackerel teriyaki, for example - but there is reassurance in the presence of great standards, and the fact that they all cost £3.

We tried some of their fabulous salami with chunks of pickled fennel, and a ramekin of sustaining rabbit rillettes with toast, and, most comforting of all, a pot of warm Parmesan custard served with thin fingers of toast smeared with salty anchovies. The latter was that glorious combination of an infantilising experience - egg and soldiers - combined with very grown-up flavours.

The first courses have their own peculiar ballast: omelettes, from a simple ham and cheese job to something bolder and pricey, with ceps and black truffles. There is steak tartare and pike boudin with fine herbs and beurre blanc, a dish that recalls Leigh's distant tenure at Le Gavroche. No pea puree with the scallops here, for that dish has gone out into the world and become a very special cliche. Instead the scallops arrive complete with bright-orange coral (oh joy) with a smooth Jerusalem artichoke puree. A crisp caramelised disc of corned beef hash comes with a poached egg and a puddle of mustard sauce.

Next, a list of fish mains, and below that the residents of those rotisseries: half a chicken with garlic and lemon for £15, or a DD-cup breast for a very reasonable £11, with crisp skin and flesh that tastes of something. There is a rib of beef for two, with Portobello mushrooms and garlic butter and, to declare an interest in game, some teal and partridge. As if consciously referencing its prime influence - the bustling brasseries of Paris - there is also choucroute garni, with a duck breast and frankfurters and morteau sausage, and it is as it should be, the meat rich and luscious, cut through by the crunchy and sour bite of the shredded braised cabbage.

We order sides of impeccable chips and lettuce hearts with vinaigrette and purple sprouting broccoli, and we are very happy and very full. But we push on to a single scoop of their apple sorbet for her, because she has been defeated, and for me a glamorous, Surbiton-circa-1974 sherry trifle (this is praise) because I am made of sterner stuff. It is a remarkable dessert menu in that it does not include creme brulee, which in London these days feels like a bold, wilful and refreshing act of heresy. Instead there is creme caramel. But of course.

Was it without faults? No. The hors d'oeuvres took an age to come, which seemed odd, given that they looked like dishes designed for fast service. I also can't deny that the duck breast with my choucroute was dry and tough and disappointing. But there is so much else here to like - no, to love - that I find it hard to bear a grudge. I want to go back, and often. Rowley Leigh has written a menu designed for eating from, and I intend to meet the challenge.

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