The Belvedere

You may have noticed that it is a slight bugbear of mine that there aren't enough dining rooms in London which are really well-designed or in any way grand, so it was a real treat to be invited to the Belvedere in Holland Park, which really is a splendid room. The ceilings are high, the art big (in all ways - Warhol and Hirst), and there are lovely leaded windows with views of the trees swaying in the park. There's a £24.95 three-course lunch menu at the weekends which offers a pretty serious number of choices, including three or four vegetarian starters, all of which b and I ignored in favour of requesting the eggs benedict minus the bacon. On doing this we then had some really great service because the waitress then returned from the kitchen to ask whether we would like spinach in place of the bacon, which was a real no-brainer and evidence of the kind of thoughtful service which is oh so rare in the capital and in general. Anyways, that dish was the real highlight for me: a well-cooked egg top a muffin and a lush pile of salted spinach, with both hollandaise and beurre blanc poured on and around the dish. Just the kind of luxuriant cooking that I like and not the kind of dish that I would ever attempt at home (though that's not saying much because my home cooking is in such a serious rut that anything more adventurous than pasta with tomato sauce would count as exotic these days).

The vegetarian main was a pasta forestiere with plenty of wild mushrooms and cream. The best thing about it, though, was the texture of the pasta which was about as al dente as is possible to be whilst still being cooked, which is meant as real praise because it meant one could really appreciate the home-madeness of the pasta. In fact, attention to texture and appreciation of the value of solidity-of-bite was a characteristic of the cooking and I really appreciated this in my pudding which was a yoghurt mousse with a kind of smashed-up blackberry crumble (T noticed just how many of the items on the menu were described as battered, smashed, crushed and so on!). The mousse was really solid and quite delicious, though by this point I was really stuffed and slightly defeated, which was a big shame as I could quite happily have a portion of it in front of my laptop now.

Gosh readers, writing about food is a funny old thing, because the more I write here, the more enthusiastic I'm becoming about food again.