London,

The Giaconda Dining Room

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Cuisine: Gastropub
A meal for two with wine, about £70 excluding service

9 Denmark Street, WC2H 8LS

Nearest Tube: Tottenham Court Road

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Phone: 020 7240 3334

Open: Open Mon-Fri noon-2.15pm and 6-9.45pm.

 

 

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Giaconda is Tin Pan Alley's gastro hit

 

At home: Paul Merrony in The Giaconda

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Gastropubs and restaurants are often the advance guard in gentrification of an area. Prices creep up. Starbucks follows. Hearing that a promising restaurant had opened in Denmark Street - that's London's Tin Pan Alley for chrissakes, Tin Pan Alley where the Rolling Stones recorded their first album and Reg Dwight (later known as Elton John) worked as an office boy at Mills Music, where Paul Simon was told that Homeward Bound and The Sound of Silence had no future, where Bob Marley bought his very first guitar and David Bowie lived in a van - I was not unconditionally thrilled.

Bad enough that the area around the "West End church", the beautiful St Giles-in-the-Fields, has been scheduled for mixed-use redevelopment by Legal and General Securities. As I picked my way through potholes and past barriers I was relieved to hear music still clamouring from the windows of the terraced houses of Denmark Street and see a hopeful young lad with a guitar slung over his shoulder - looking not at all like Bob Dylan - slouching, if not towards Bethlehem then at least, I hope, a meeting with an A&R man.

In the mid-Sixties David Bowie met his first backing group, The Lower 3rd, at the Giaconda Café at 9 Denmark Street. A decade later it was a hangout for The Clash and The Slits. I wonder if Australian chef/proprietor of the recently opened Giaconda Dining Room, Paul Merrony, knows what hopes and fears lie underfoot.

Merrony, who has worked in England before when he trained with the Roux brothers, made his name in Sydney at the Cricketer's Arms, Merrony's and Bistro 163. His revamp of the 35-seater premises where Joe Strummer must once have had cups of tea cannot be faulted for understatement and a tactful presence.

The dining room is furnished with unadorned wooden tables and a wall of wine. There is one abstract painting. A glimpse of the small kitchen at the back is the only other visual distraction. Merrony has been quoted as saying that he wanted to create "the sort of place I'd want to eat in" with, presumably, the sort of food he likes to cook. This turns out to be a list of dishes with natural allure and currently priced in a manner that you could call old-hat.

A carafe of filtered water and a basket of bread and olives are brought immediately to the table by a likeable and efficient waitress. I have eaten both lunch and dinner at The Giaconda and at lunchtime she was Australian and in the evening French.

Merrony's boneless (almost!) crisped pig's trotters is apparently a signature dish. A jellied oblong of seasoned chopped meat and cartilage is crisped in the frying and tastes delicious. It is served on top of salad leaves, slices of hard-boiled egg, croutons and almonds, which do not fulfil the menu description of - what would be the more delectable accompaniment - egg mayonnaise. So ultimately it reads a little better than it eats.

Beetroot and leeks vinaigrette with goat's curd mousse is a fresh and sparky salad. In another first course the wisdom of combining eggs, spinach, cheese and cream is made manifest and done with the eggs perfectly softcentred-"I could never have achieved that," says Reg.

Crab omelette with green salad is extraordinarily generous in crab content - I count four pieces of claw meat just in the garnish - and the coral has been used to startling effect layered into the eggs. Vitello tonnato, rosy pink slices of cold poached veal dressed with a tuna sauce, is presented on leaves of radicchio interspersed with potatoes and more slices of hard-boiled egg (it must be an Aussie thing). Fundamentally such an elegant and appealing dish, it would have benefited from being tidier.

Merrony approaches pasta with gusto. His penne with pork sausage, veal shin and tomato stew is a rollicking affair as is rigatoni puttanesca (the working girl's cupboard sauce of tomatoes, capers, anchovies and olives) which is truer and better (I think) and cheaper at £6.50 without optional extras of prawns or mussels at £3.50. Grilled sirloin with baked mushrooms served with mustard sauce and chips was a fine steak cooked to the desired doneness, its three field mushrooms riding on top like soporific passengers. Knowing something about the requirements of restaurant GP (gross profit) I wonder how this steak and its accoutrements can be offered at £13.

Desserts of iced nougat with raspberriesand poached peach with Eton mess are sweet, fluffy and seasonally fruity, which is all you need ask of a pudding. Wines are fairly priced and if it is warm when you go to The Giaconda Dining Room, I can enthusiastically recommend the Chinon 2005 Domaine Alain Lorieux served chilled. This winemaker embraces "travail raisonnée", which means giving respect to the environment, shunning fertilisers and pesticides. And you can tell.

The arrival of The Giaconda Dining Room in Denmark Street turns out not to be gentrification. It is elucidation. Would that there were more such straightforward restaurants run by a passionate chef with a healthy appetite, especially in the surrounding Soho area. Maybe not another in Tin Pan Alley. We would not want it to become Stainless Steel Alley.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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