With two of London’s leading restaurant personalities  - Phil Howard of the Square and restaurateur Rebecca Mascarenhas - behind it you’d expect Kitchen W8 to be good but it delivers in spades.

Just reading the menu creates that frisson of excitement you get when you spot a  load of new ideas and dishes you’ve got to try. Prime example: Game Consommé with Bacon Cream and a Small Game Hot Dog. Game consommé is the sort of dish you expect to find in a gentleman’s club but anoint it with a cappucino-like topping of this year’s must-have ingredient, bacon and accompany it with a mini hot dog made with a perfect game sausage and you’ve got a umami-bomb of a dish that I suspect will be copied all over London. It was delicious as was a more conventional starter of butternut squash risotto and chanterelles with red wine and a soft poached egg, a sort of fusion of risotto and oeufs en meurette.

The stand out main looks to be grilled ox tongue with shallot purée and foie gras baked potato but as I don’t eat foie gras I had to give that a miss, opting instead for roast rump of veal with spatzle, chanterelles and a cauliflower croquette (trending ticks for spatzle and cauliflower which are also hot ingredients at the moment). It was a beautifully balanced dish, better I thought than a slightly overworked disc of pot roasted pork belly with crushed root vegetable, black pudding (also deep-fried, croquette-style) and apple. Other tempting options are a surf’n’turf combination of roast Icelandic cod, caramelised trotter, Savoy cabbage and lentils and 'Flat iron' [sic] steak and chips with smoked red wine butter - bargains at £15 and £14 respectively.

The one disappointment was a weird-sounding dish of passion fruit and lime mess with Brillat Savarin cream which I felt I had to try given my interest in cheese. The Brillat-Savarin gave the dish a luxuriant mascarpone-like texture but it was a little too much of a good thing, taking the edge off the freshness of the passionfruit and lime. (I should have accepted the waiter’s steer towards the crème fraîche tart with lemon curd ice cream.) More classic and more satisfying was a warm bitter chocolate pudding with hazelnut praline and vanilla ice cream, so rich that it even defeated my chocoholic daughter.

Other aspects of the restaurant are well thought out. A thoughtful, well-priced winelist drawn up by sommelier Simon Freeman who used to be at Hibiscus) with a fair number of  options by the glass and carafe. A super-cheap Yarra Valley Little Yering Pinot Noir was better than it had any right to be at £5 a glass (£20.50 a bottle) and proved a more than adequate match for the ‘dog’ and the veal.

The decor - all soft green and warm browns - is sophisticated and slightly retro in a New Yorkish sort of way (in fact this is a very New Yorkish sort of restaurant of the type that Howard’s collaborator at the Square Nigel Platts-Martin does so well). The bread is good (especially the pumpkin and onion). The fresh chocolate truffles served with the coffee are sublime. The only downside is the rather tediously ‘yah’ Kensington clientele, a fair number of whom are the wrong side of 60. But then they're the ones with the dosh.

At the moment this is one of London's great bargains, less hip than Hix but with even better food. Go while you can book and before they put up the prices.

Kitchen W8 is at 11 Abingdon Road, London W8 6AH. Tel: 020 7937 0120 www.kitchenw8.com