Fernandez & Wells at Somerset House, WC2 - review

Rick Wells, a former BBC World Service reporter, and Jorge Fernandez, formerly at the Monmouth Coffee Company, opened their first places in 2007, a Spanish-style food-and-wine bar in Lexington Street, quickly followed by a coffee house around the corner in Beak Street.

The aim was to emulate the values of a farmer's market, with really good, well-sourced food, freshly put together in a relaxed but stylish environment - great coffee, rustic sandwiches, a soup or two, top-grade hams and cheeses, a glass of wine. It turns out to be a great way of eating, as much as you could possibly need most days - and the atmosphere in Fernandez & Wells pulls off the not-so-easy trick of being warm and intimate, yet pretty cool too. A third branch appeared not far away in St Anne's Court in 2009; now here's their fourth, opened this week in the glory of Somerset House.

This one's on a much grander scale, occupying three sizeable rooms in this great palace, with seating for more than 100. The design has changed: whereas the Soho joints suggest that you've been mystically transported into provincial Spain, here the look is urban and slicker, with modernist birch furniture, a stripped wood floor, metallic grids beneath hard benches and lights suspended from the high ceiling.

There are some striking decorative touches - chains of mighty hams displayed over the fireplace, big wire baskets of oranges and lemons behind the bar, lovely bleached wood ledges to the windows overlooking the courtyard. But overall the design leaves the feel of these beautifully proportioned neoclassical rooms intact, making this one of the most elegant places in London to eat and drink, comparable to, say, the Kensington Palace Orangerie, only with much better food.

With a glass of crisp white Rioja (£4), we had fantastic smoked anchovy fillets (£9.50, completely worth it) from a small family supplier, Conservas Nardin in the Basque port of Getaria, recently rated by a Spanish panel of experts as the best anchovy in the world: plump, luscious, with a real taste of fresh oily fish rather than of a preserve, the absolute essence of anchovy, unlike any I've had before.

In comparison, grilled Padron peppers, with good olive oil and a scattering of sea salt (£4.50), seemed merely very good, none of them disconcertingly hot, as sometimes happens.

Then we went large with a board of Jamon Iberico de Bellota, "hand-carved slices of 36-month cured ham from Lampnio pigs, reared by Juan Pedro Domecq, Huelva, southern Spain" (£19.50, but more than enough for two, however greedy) - again, stunning, the best ham you could hope to eat, both profoundly meaty and completely melting, even leaving an aftertaste as great wines do. At once, utterly simple and ultimately hoggish.

There's no need to spend so much, of course. We filled up with a hot sandwich of lomo (excellent smoked pork loin, instantly evocative of Spain) with cooked tomato and manchego cheese (£6) and another of peppery aubergine, with pine nuts, sultanas, feta and lemon (£4.50), both knockouts, each a meal in itself. So we didn't venture into the soups, the salamis, the sausages, the cheeses, the cakes (sticky toffee and date looked pretty extraordinary).

A lovely place, this, great value too. Perhaps it will be noisy once it fills up? For once, no matter.