We’d all like a great little neighbourhood restaurant. A place to go to regularly, a place you can rely on whenever you don’t feel like cooking.

A one-off it would be, not a soulless chain, but nothing too ambitious or painfully priced either. A home from home, in fact. A place where they know you and are pleased to see you again.

This little fantasy doesn’t sound unfulfillable but in reality such restaurants have always been rare, and lately they’ve been made all the rarer by the rise of the gastropub.

Ollins, which opened a little over a year ago just off Gloucester Road in a site that used to be a not especially inviting wine bar called Scandies, wants to be just such a place.

It seems like the right area to keep such a restaurant busy, too. The lovely manicured streets between here and Kensington Square are home to people who are — how best to put it? — still not very price-sensitive. Until a year or so ago they used to treat the old-style Launceston Place as the neighbourhood brasserie, a role it fulfilled very likeably if you didn’t mind the bill. Now, however, the refurbed Launceston Place serves food prepared by a protégé of Marcus Wareing, Tristan Welch, which is absurdly pretentious, a ghastly charade of amuse-gueules and pre-desserts, all foams and froths. Nobody in his right mind would go there twice, in my opinion, though certain restaurant critics seem to admire it.

On paper, Ollins looks to be an appealingly modest alternative, just the other end of this beautiful street. Starters range from the soup of the day at £4 to just £5.20 for a crispy duck salad. Somehow, a lobster salad with lime is delivered for just £4.80 (not available on the evening we went, in the middle of the freeze).

Mains run from a Toulouse sausage with mash at £9.50 to £17 for sirloin steak or lamb cutlet.
And, for this price, most of the food was good value. Forest mushrooms in garlic and herb cream with ciabatta toast (£4.80) didn’t include any wild mushrooms but was a medley of the kind you get from supermarkets, cooked perhaps a little less than it might have been, served in an amount of cream that one wouldn’t prepare oneself at home — a plush mushrooms on toast, then.

Avocado, mozzarella and tomato salad with basil oil (£4.50) was a simple, acceptable tricolore — the cheese fresh-tasting but bland, not one of the ultra-artisanal bufala versions now stocked by the likes of Waitrose, the tomatoes a little chilled, never a helpful temperature for a tomato, whatever its calibre.

From the mains, calves liver and bacon with bubble and squeak (£13.50) was a generous portion, let down by a basic cooking error — the butter it was cooked in had been burned and made bitter, a mistake we all inattentively make sometimes, at which point you throw it away and start again. Here, though, it remained to leave an aftertaste to the whole dish. The big pieces of bacon, moreover, seemed average back — where thin-sliced, well-crisped streaky or pancetta would have been better.

Pan-fried sea bass with spinach, butternut squash and capers (£16) was a good piece of fish but again had a very creamy sauce — and, quite peculiarly, the chunks of squash had the tough skin left on.

After this, puddings looked insurmountable but include a crumble of the day with either custard or ice-cream (£3.80), a sticky toffee pudding and a cheesecake. There’s a short, interesting wine list, opening at £14 a bottle, with some enterprising items, including a couple of good Lebanese reds.

The oddity here is the service, the personal service, from the proprietor. It’s strangely old-fashioned and a touch obsequious. We were effusively congratulated on our choices of food and wine. And there’s a strange amount of faffing — a paper napkin ostentatiously tied around the neck of every bottle; almost devotional pouring of the wine; presentation of a finger-bowl and toothpicks after the main course; Fox’s glacier mints, not seen for many a year, with the bill...

You either like this treatment or you don’t. It is, evidently, a place for habitués who respond to such cosseting, perhaps expecting it wherever they go. It’s not our neighbourhood, though, and we left looking forward to our next impersonal chain, where it’s all plonked down and you’re left alone to get on with it. If you’re tired of Wagamama, you’re tired of life, I think.