Sosta

Sacchi and Sacchi is not a new advertising agency, but the father and daughter team behind the newly opened restaurant SOSTA in Crouch End. Poppa Sacchi, otherwise known as Silvano, was the founder of some quintessentially Seventies Italian restaurants including Barracuda in Baker Street and San Martino in St Martin's Lane.

The late Margaret Costa, writing about Barracuda in a guide she published in 1971 called London at Table, likened the restaurant to an emerald cavern beneath the sea, a subaqueous pleasure dome, an enchanted, romantic grotto. She praised the customers for seeming as if they had stepped from the pages of Vogue magazine, the energetic multilingual staff, the group who played for dancing and the liberal amounts of cream, wine, brandy and liqueurs poured into the dishes "at every suitable (and unsuitable) opportunity".

Thirty years ago that was how some of us liked our Italian restaurants to be, and even now, when some flayed and neutered cinder snatched from a wood-fired oven is put in front of me in the name of authenticity, I think just a little longingly of a soft, enveloping zabaglione whipped up over a spirit lamp by a smirking Italian maître d' in a shiny sharkskin dinner jacket.

As Italian restaurateurs of that generation were apt to do, Signor Sacchi sold out to Grand Metropolitan and moved back to Italy. Of course, after a working life spent screwing a pepper mill you can miss the activity and, when daughter Kate contacted her father to say that she wanted to open a restaurant with modern Italian cooking, he came happily back to help.

Crouch End is not exactly an enchanted grotto, but it is a 'burb bursting with restaurants. If I remember rightly, what preceded Sosta at the premises was a greasy spoon. Sausage, egg, bacon, beans and a slice has given way to rocket salad with Parmesan shavings, and home-made ravioli stuffed with sea bass and prawns served with a butter and fish sauce.

The space, a quite small front room unmemorably decorated, was busy but not full. The pricing structure for a weekday evening meal, starting at £17.95 for two courses, may have been something of a deterrent. With the £1 cover charge and service charge at 10 per cent added in, it is not so much that just over £20 for food seems excessive these days, it is more the apparent absence of flexibility that is perhaps psychologically unappealing.

Four of us tried two courses each and, while some fared a little better than others, no one was captivated by the cooking. The recipient of Parmesan, cherry tomato and rocket salad followed by fillet of monkfish with mushrooms and stir-fried vegetables succinctly described both courses as dull. Carpaccio of salmon followed by spaghetti with mussels came in for a similar evaluation and the observation that the mussels were few and far between.

The meat eaters did somewhat better with a dish of gnocchi emboldened by a rough Italian sausage; a sturdy veal chop in an equally sturdy brown gravy; and a rather enterprising roulade of calves' liver with red onion marmalade and roasted cubed potatoes.

If you are having lively conversation and a good time, which we were, food, if it arrives at the right pace, which it did, can seem not all that important, but from time to time my mind strayed to the old days of the frisson of excitement supposedly engendered by pollo sorpresa (the surprise element in the fried supreme of chicken was the hot melted garlic butter inside spurting over your best silk blouse).

Sosta might do well to take a judicious look at the past for its culinary inspiration; its stated aim of being modern is not matching up to modern as in, say, Ibla, Teca, Grano, Tentazione, Olivo, Zucca, Assagi etc. Service from the all-female waiting staff (in that, Sosta is modern) is friendly and accommodating.

Sosta
Middle Lane, London, N8 8PL