Le Café Anglais in a nutshell
Food: Modern British with a look over the shoulder to the old-fashioned hotel dining rooms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Dip into the hors d’oeuvres and don’t miss the roast chicken and the pommes anna (a crispy potato tian)
Wine: Over 400 bins intelligently divided up by region and style. Plenty available by the glass and carafe
Style/Decor: A vast open space. Parisien brasserie meets 1950s English department store with a very un-English open rotisserie thrown in.
Service: aimiable but slow
Who to go with: Friends and family. Fellow francophiles.
Who not to go with: Not much good for a romantic dinner
Verdict: This isn’t the most precise cooking in London but it’s a strong contender for the most pleasurable.

There are some restaurants at which you start planning your next trip the moment you start reading the menu. The giveaway sign is when it throws you into agonies of indecision, knowing that whatever you choose will leave you wishing you’d had whatever is on your dining companion’s plate. So it is with the newly opened Le Café Anglais. It’s clever.

Mind you it should be. Its chef Rowley Leigh, who formerly cooked at the much loved Kensington Place, has been at the stove for 30 years and is credited with being one of the founders of Modern British cuisine. In fact like other chefs of his generation such as Alastair Little, Martin Lam of Ransome’s Dock and Stephen Markwick of Culinaria, my much-loved local in Bristol, he has an ongoing love affair with sort of French and Italian cooking best represented by the works of Elizabeth David: simple but full of flavour. He also - hallelujah! - really understands and loves wine.

We can’t resist ordering an aperitif from the aperitif list which includes cocktails, Lustau sherries and an interesting selection of white wines including an ethereal 2000 Maximin Grünhauser Spåtlese Abtsberg Von Schubert (I know it's ethereal because that’s what I order). My husband has an excellent 2006 Sylvaner Vieilles Vignes from Domaine Ostertag.

Our elderly neighbours (very Kensington) are talking about a troublesome friend called Daphne. The room, we suddenly realise, is the perfect reincarnation of the sort of department store restaurant we were taken to by our mothers for a treat. Soaring ceilings. White tablecloths. A patterned carpet. A carpet. I haven’t seen a carpet in a restaurant for years.

Eventually after reading and dithering for about a quarter of an hour we manage to order. We go for the hors d’oeuvres which evokes a wave of nostalgia for a start. Anywhere else they would be called tapas. There are sweet crunchy leeks in vinaigrette topped with aubergine caviar, rabbit rillettes, fragrant with mace served with pickled endive (a great idea), crispy salsify fritters, a wobbly warm parmesan custard with anchovy toasts and strips of sweet red peppers, topped with fresh anchovies and egg mimosa (chopped hard-boiled egg). Sophisticated spins on old-fashioned dishes. We could easily have lunched on this course alone and I’m sure many will.

Given the smells coming off the nearby rotisserie we couldn’t resist the roasts though. By contrast to the hors d’oeuvres these were straight-down-the-line English, the sort of food you might get for Sunday lunch at friends in the country. Though my partridge. cabbage and bacon was perfectly good I lusted after my husband’s garlic-saturated roast chicken with its wonderful buttery juices (I knew there would be some point where I wanted what he’d ordered.) I did however get the wine choice spot on, a silkily sweet Monthélie (a lesser known burgundy) from Domaine Caillot, from the comprehensive and intelligent winelist.

We were far too full to even contemplate dessert but were amused to see that Leigh had adopted the old French habit of serving fresh fruit (apparently served with a choice of clotted cream, fromage frais, ice cream, rice pudding and yoghurt) and a vast selection of ice creams, sorbets and sundaes. There are also some classic English puddings, as you’d expect.

This isn’t the most precise cooking in London but it’s a strong contender for the most pleasurable. A London institution is born. I can’t wait to go back.

Le Cafe Anglais, 8 Porchester Gardens, London W8 2DB. Tel: +44 (0)20 7221 1415. www.lecafeanglais.co.uk

* There’s a wonderful account of how the restaurant was set up on the FT website
According to Rowley the original Café Anglais was “the great Parisian restaurant of the 19th century, the source of Pommes Anna and Sole Dugléré, the setting for the great Dinner of the Three Emperors, the place that served elephant during the Commune. It died in 1900, having been founded in 1815 after the battle of Waterloo."