Smile and say cheese at La Fromagerie

They don’t take bookings and often that works fine. You can walk straight in for a glass of wine in the early evening, just sharing a plate of antipasti (£8.95) — all very soothing. During the week, you can usually immediately sit down for lunch, too.

At the weekend, though, it’s a different proposition. Worshippers wait long for tables. La Fromagerie is a top London tip on US foodie websites ("OMG!") and the clientele is predominantly prosperous, middle-aged Americans, very full of themselves. They wear sunglasses indoors, you know.

At first, the queueing seems tolerable enough because it gives you a chance to inspect the incredible range of produce on offer: perfect Umbrian lentils, killer fava beans, a bottle of verjus — so hard to find! But then you start to notice the prices. That verjus, all the way from Australia, costs £8 for a small bottle.

And service, when you finally get to a table, is haphazard: sometimes charming, mostly very slow, even though the "kitchen menu" only delivers salads, cold food and soup.

And there’s just something very California-ascetic about it all. Soused mackerel, served with toasted German bread, some salad leaves and a plop of crème fraîche (£7.95) was unrewarding — just one side of a smallish fish, displeasingly sour in flavour and extraordinarily tough in texture, as if it had been cured for footwear, not food.

A salad of wood-roast beetroot, caprini freschi, Castelluccio lentils and soft herbs (£11.50) was underwhelming too — excellent thick, rich, melting goat’s cheese, as you would expect, but a bland lentil salad, with celery, carrot and leek worked in, some parsley and mint too, but still tasting underseasoned (there’s no salt and pepper offered, just as no bread on the side was forthcoming). And a salad of roast chicken with Charlotte potatoes, peas and mint (£12.50) was also a bore, the chicken, a small serving of thigh, surprisingly flavourless; the peas, bound up with the potatoes in mayonnaise, fresh but hard.

But why come to La Fromagerie for the cooking? Mistake. Come for the cheese. The small plate at £8.75 and a glass of wine (£5.65 for a good Côtes du Rhone from Sablet, for example) makes a really memorable lunch. Slices of five different cheeses, the selection changing every day, are arranged around a plate. On the menu there’s an informative tasting note on each so that you can appreciate what you are eating.

It’s a thoughtful little composition in itself, the order worth respecting. Beginning with the milder and fresher cheeses, it ended with a sumptuous blue — a Gorgonzola dolce cremificato, as they justifiably say, "creamy and silky, quite unlike the usual soapy version". In fact, like all the cheeses, so lovingly sourced and impeccably kept here, it makes every version you have previously had seem one-dimensional. Coeur Neufchatel from Normandy, for example, can be a chalky disappointment if over-chilled. Here it was a revelation. An Epoisses affine was indeed, as promised, "wonderfully aromatic". And as many little-known Italian cheeses as French are served, just when the season suits them best.

To accompany the cheese you get five slices of bread, some butter — and that’s enough. On the plate this week, there were also some dried Moscatel grapes, sweet enough in themselves though they had been drizzled with honey, making them too sticky. Never mind.

What you need is wine, and though the list here is extensive, adventurous and intriguing, it’s not cheap. The likeable house red is a Château le Roc Côtes du Frontonnais, from near Montauban, based on the rare Negrette grape, at £16.80 a bottle, £3.95 a small glass, £4.95 a large glass. But what they mean by a small glass is very small, 125ml, even a "large" is only 175ml — and thereafter prices zoom upwards.

A plate of cheese is not the most dietetically balanced meal you can eat — the Epoisses and the Gorgonzola both clock in at 48 per cent fat — but when it’s as good as this, it is a gastronomic experience of the highest impact. Worth fasting for. Even worth queueing for.

La Fromagerie Café
2-4 Moxon Street, W1U 4EW