A Little reason to be cheerful

If restaurants weren?t so expensive, would more people go to them, thus enabling restaurants to bring down their prices? This is a conundrum many restaurateurs seem unwilling to address, so we continue to pick up the bill for huge start-up costs, often for overblown design.

It is a peculiarly optimistic approach, particularly in this current climate, and results in making gastronomically ambitious, but often ephemerally fashionable establishments the preserve of the few. Of course it is possible to eat relatively inexpensively at chains or ethnic cafes, but with too few ?proper? regularly affordable restaurants an eating-out culture falls apart. And ours is new and still fragile.

The thought made me look with interest at Peter Ilic?s latest venture, LITTLE BAY RESTAURANT in Clerkenwell. Ilic has always been the champion of the good-value meal. About 20 years ago, after opening La Cloche and The Lantern in Kilburn and Pigeon in Fulham, he suggested that people pay what they thought their meal was worth at his next establishment, Just Around the Corner. Surprisingly he was not left out-of-pocket.

His formula at the other establishments was one (remarkably restrained) price for each course, and he carried this on more recently to LMNT in Hackney, Little Bay in West Hampstead and now to its sibling.

The decorative effects in Farringdon Road are half-heartedly zany ? handpainted flowers on the walls have a distinctly amateurish look, and just one Greek mask and one Eastern statue have, without much rhyme or reason, been installed.

The evening menu prices are £2.95 for first courses, £7.95 for main courses and £2.95 for dessert. Side orders of vegetables are £1.95 each; lunchtime rates are about a pound or two cheaper. There seems no recourse to wrapping ingredients in pastry-an economic mode of maximising the protein which used to prevail in Ilic establishments. The launch menu main courses such as baked fillet of sea bass with green olives and lemon grass dressing, breast of free-range chicken ?kesh-kesh? with artichokes, and grilled rib-eye steak at £7.95, are not far off a home cook?s budget.

The reasons for gigantic restaurant mark-ups are well rehearsed; rents, rates, staff costs, utilities, insurance, flowers, laundry and so forth, but here they seem to have been minimised. Ilic may have a direct line to his home country of Yugoslavia for help, but front of house staff were professional and seemed genuinely determined to make the meal a pleasant, even gracious, experience complete with well-chosen jazz on the tapes.

Our meal was steamed mussels with ginger and lemon grass cream and asparagus with a thin hollandaise followed by roast duck breast with fine red cabbage and cod steak on rather lacklustre ratatouille, and then good chocolate fondant and an unspecified blue cheese with gooseberry chutney, cucumber and celery. It was more than token cooking, it was tremendous value at the price without being fast food or freezer food ? the kitchen is on view in a corner of the restaurant. It can be done. And it should be done more.

Little Bay Restaurant
Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3AL