Sartoria: a smart West End Italian

I’ve always been a fan of Francesco Mazzei’s cooking so when he suddenly left his previous restaurant L’Anima I couldn’t wait for him to pop up somewhere else.

It’s taken a while but now he seems to have found his natural home in the revamped Sartoria in Savile Row.

Like L’Anima it’s a posh sort of place designed to appeal to city boys on expense accounts (this part of Mayfair hosts a number of hedge funds) though I noticed there were a fair amount of what looked like well-heeled Italian businessmen there too. It’s warmer and more convivial than L’Anima with plenty of potential for people watching so you want to make sure you get a corner table rather than one that leaves one of you with their back to the room. (We managed to get ours changed. I can recommend table 6.)

Seduced by the idea of lobster tagliolini my friend Thane and I rapidly dismissed the affordable option of the set lunch menu in favour of exploring the à la carte. We were going to have a starter and a primo then felt we ‘should’ have a main and at least a couple of the sides should be explored. All in the interests of doing the menu justice, you understand, not because we’re pigs.

The lobster was just fantastic with fat chunks of sweet meat, silky pasta and a really intense shellfish sauce. We also loved the burrata with ‘torpendino’ tomatoes and smoked aubergine with an amazing hit of fragrant basil leaves and a chunkily cut beef tartare with anchovies and truffle. The fritto misto we ordered was slightly less impressive with as much courgette as fish though there were some delicious little monkfish tails lurking in it. And someone had been a bit too heavy handed with the nutmeg on the double baked potatoes with mozzarella, a dish that sounded more seductive than it tasted, even for this potato lover. Nice fresh rocket salad on the side though.

On the next door table a couple were tucking into a vast veal milanese that would comfortably have served three, served with an overflowing bowl of courgette fries. Seeing us eyeing it up they generously offered us a taste - and that was tops too - cut more thickly than the usual escalope from good veal with plenty of flavour.

After this we resolved to resist the zabaglione we’d had our eye on but hadn’t reckoned with Francesco sending out a couple of desserts - a really faultless tiramisu - not too creamy, not too sweet, and a clever, ravishingly pretty plate of lemon-curd stuffed meringues with crisp shards of rhubarb. It would have been rude not to really ...

We kept our bill under reasonable control by sticking to wine by the glass, a Verdicchio and a Pieropan Soave to start with, and a gorgeous Fiano di Avellino from Guido Marsella which was perfect with the lobster. It would be easy to be led into spending a good deal more by the persuasive waiters - although there are bottles for as little as £25 on the wide-ranging Italian wine list.

One of the big attractions of Sartoria is that it’s open all day so should you suddenly crave a tiramisu after a particularly fraught shopping session in Regent Street you could indulge the whim. Or, even better, plan a power breakfast. I particularly like the sound of the eggs purgatorio with spicy tomato and ‘nduja sauce (Francesco, coming from Calabria, is the man who started the whole nduja craze).

Sartoria is pricey but if you go with the idea of dropping in for a dish it’s affordable. And very cossetting, I must say.

Sartoria is at 20 Savile Row, London W1S 3PR. Tel: 020 7534 7000

Disclosure: we were given complimentary desserts and aperitifs

Ellory, Hackney: well worth the detour

With city centre rents unaffordable for most first-time restaurateurs there’s a growing trend for the most exciting openings to be happening in local neighbourhoods. That’s certainly been the case in London for a while.

But what’s the incentive to take what can easily be an hour’s schlep across the city involving convoluted transport links to eat when you probably have perfectly good restaurants on your own doorstep?

Well a full 125ml glass of Agrapart’s 'Les 7' 1er cru, one of the best grower champagnes around, for just £10 might be one of them and that’s what Ellory in Hackney is offering to sweeten the blow of having to hang around on a rainy night for the D6 from Bethnal Green*.

There’s plenty more to tempt at this stylish small wine-focused restaurant which was opened back in November by chef Matthew Lucas Young and sommelier Jack Lewens in Netil House, an arty space which houses over 100 studios. Both have an impressive pedigree. Young was the much-admired chef of the Wapping Project and Mayfields, Lewens has worked at The River Café, Quo Vadis and Spring.

Having both eaten out for lunch we passed on the fairly priced £38 5 course tasting menu in favour of picking our own dishes (brownie points for offering that alternative and for delivering them one by one in a logical order rather than the bizarre hot-to-cold mish-mash favoured by so many restaurants these days.)

There’s real skill in the flavour, colour and texture combinations. A coarsely chopped slightly smokey venison tartare came with nutty Jerusalem artichokes, a clever riff on meat and two veg that almost looked, in my inevitable instagram snap, like a Dutch old master (above). It was perfect with the Agrapart.

The smoked eel with choggia beetroot and pear which came next was even better, a lovely contrast of warm, smoky flesh, sweet fruit and earthy vegetables. Young likes to limit the number of ingredients on the plate, an approach that permits a wine (in this case a very young but not the least awkward 2015 Muscadet One Shot of Granit from Domaine de Bellevue) to shine. With a seasonal dish of squid with blood orange and chicory we had a richly textured 2010 Arbois Cuvée des Docteurs* from Lucien Aviet made from Melon a Queue Rouge, a local variant of chardonnay. Mature chardonnay with a fresh seasonal salad? Absolutely!

But the best dish - and pairing - was the shared main we managed to find room for, described simply on the menu as turbot, brown butter and carrot which was served two different ways - roast and as an unctuous purée with some wilted greens on the side. White, orange and green - you can see how Young applies his art school training. With that we had a glass of a new (to me) orange wine called La Macération du Soula, a gorgeously rich skin contact Vermentino from Gerard Gauby in the Roussillon. That was worth the detour too.

We skipped dessert in favour of cheese, again described deceptively simply as Berkswell and pear. But again, what presentation. A flurry of Berkswell shavings over slivers of pear with shards of crisp, well-baked flatbread on the side. And a further ‘taster’ (er hem) of Michel Lafarge’s still surprisingly vibrant 2006 Passetoutgrains L’Exception - another vinous treat.

You’ll get the best out of Ellory if you just leave it to Lewens to pick your wine for you. There’s not so much an intention to match the ingredients precisely but to pour an interesting wine with an appropriate style of dish which Lewens does with great skill. That said it could turn into a more expensive evening than you intended. Our bill for two was £99, champagne excluded* - a bit indulgent for a school night (and way over the Government’s guidelines) but certainly cheaper than a comparable meal in the West End.

And I did succumb to an Uber on the way home ….

Ellory is at Netil House, 1 Westgate Street, London E8 3RL and currently open from Tuesday to Saturday from 5-11pm. *Apparently the nearest station is not Bethnal Green but London Fields on the overground!

Disclosure: We were treated to a glass of champagne by the management who recognised us when we came in. (I was with Niamh of @eatlikeagirl).

45 Jermyn Street, Fortnum and Mason

It’s hard to stand out amidst the flood of new restaurant openings that greet each week in London at the moment but the magical words ‘caviar trolley’ give you as good a chance as any.

The trolley - which is made in New Cross of all unlikely places - is the centrepiece of 45 Jermyn Street, department store Fortnum & Mason’s glitzy new in-house restaurant which has taken over from the somewhat staid Fountain. It’s entirely typical of the company’s flamboyant CEO Ewan Venters, a Willy Wonka-style impresario who has brought a touch of indulgent playfulness to this venerable London institution (and apparently taken profits from £300k to £3.8m a year in the process.)

If you succumb to the trolley you can choose from oscietra or beluga caviar at £3.20 or £6.70 a gram respectively - which also buys you some mini baked potatoes, sour cream, toast, chive blinis (a little rubbery) and a soft mass of scrambled eggs which are expertly stirred at the table by the maitre’d. (I asked him if he called himself the caviar sommelier but apparently not. I’m not sure he’d quite bargained for his scrambling duties.) I’d say you need rather more than the minimum 10g of caviar you're required to order to balance the extras - more like 20g which would make it expensive unless you go for the Siberian sturgeon at £2 a gram but Fortnum's has never been about belt-tightening. Add a glass of champagne at £12 and service and you’re looking at around £70 a head.

There are cheaper options - and despite the presence of main courses such as Dover sole and the rather delicious rich, buttery spaetzle (German-style pasta) with lobster I had after the caviar I think this is the kind of place to pop in for a drink and a dish - a late breakfast, a high tea or an after-theatre supper rather than a three course meal. I was going to say it’s the kind of place to take 10 year olds for a half term or holiday treat but discovered the coupes and floats I thought were tailormade for tinies contain a fair amount of booze. This is a place is for grown-up kids.

What you’re paying for at 45 Jermyn Street is good old fashioned glamour. It’s all smooth squishy orange banquettes and subdued flattering table lights*. If you're not on a caviar budget you could drop in for breakfast for about a tenner to eat what I’m sure would be a pukka bacon sandwich or an egg-topped marmite crumpet and a pot of tea. I might well do just that.

*which aren’t quite brightly lit enough, note powers that be at 45, to illuminate the menus for those of us who are short-sighted. Bigger print or a bolder font please.

I ate at 45 Jermyn Street as a guest of the restuarant. You can book on 0207 205 4545 or reserve on the website. Usefully it's open all day 7 days a week.

Lurra - the latest London restaurant you need to know about

With so much of what’s going on on the London dining scene happening east of the City it’s good to find a hip new restaurant opening slap in the middle of the West End

Actually Seymour Place (just off Edgware Road) is becoming quite the hotspot. Not only does it have Lurra (which means ‘land’ in Basque) but its elder sibling Donostia, Lockhart and a branch of the excellent wine bar and bottle shop Vinoteca. All within five minutes walk of Marble Arch tube.

Lurra ticks all the boxes for 2015 eating out: wood-fired grill, open plan kitchen, obscure seafood, Galician beef which, it turns out, the owners import and supply to other top restaurants and butchers including Kitty Fisher's and Turner and George. Smart cookies.

Only the bright, naturally lit, almost Scandi decor, a welcome change from the now standardised bare brick and reclaimed tables, is not au courant - maybe even sparking off its own trend.

I can’t claim my meal there was typical as I was invited for a press event which meant I got to eat both the turbot and the 14 (yes FOURTEEN) year old beef, an indulgence I would definitely have baulked at had I been paying the bill. Both are designed for sharing but still ... At £65 a kilo, they’re clearly priced more for the locals from nearby Connaught Village than cash-strapped twenty-somethings from the other side of town.

The turbot doesn’t look much but is delicious with its Txacoli (sharply flavoured Basque white wine) dressing. (Dressing? It used to be called a sauce in my day.)

The beef is great too though I’m not sure its 5000-odd day life makes it that much more flavourful than a well hung animal of a third its age. It certainly adds a lot of fat which the clean eating brigade may not appreciate. The accompanying fries and aioli though are stellar - as are the grilled veg which is probably what the clean eaters will stick to.

Before that we kicked off with some excellent prawn croquetas, ‘blistered Gernika peppers’ and some curiously unseasoned marrowbone (more fat) which could have done with a good sprinkling of salt - maybe it was just omitted on the pass. And I know they’re regarded as a delicacy and someone has to eat them if they’re not to be thrown away but hake kokotxas (aka hake throats) just don't do it for me. The grilled squid stuffed with prawns and chorizo with squid ink sauce is another matter. I could happily repeat that on any future visit as I could the scoop of walnut ice cream - all I could squeeze in after such a blowout.

Other plusses: the mainly Spanish winelist is particularly strong and I loved the theatre of our server pouring the crisp Basque wine Txacoli at table from a considerable height. And there’s a lovely room upstairs that would be great for a celebration dinner party.

So will you like Lurra? Depends. If you’re a fussy eater - or like your food prettified - my guess is not. There’s a challenging element to the food you wouldn’t find at say, Barrafina or José Pizarro, two of London’s other top Spanish restaurants. Basque food is rustic and this is authentic Basque.

But if your habitual haunt is Hackney I reckon you will. You may wince at the prices but you don’t have to go for the big set-piece dishes. In theory. I suspect few of you will be able to resist 'that' steak though for me it's squid'n'chips that'll be the lure. I'll be back.

Lurra is at 9, Seymour Place, London W1H 5BA. Tel: 0207 724 4545.