Moti Mahal

Moti Mahal is a modern Indian restaurant in Covent Garden's Great Queen Street. The restuarant started in India and has now expanded globally, the chef used to cook for the Indian Prime Minister apparently. The decor, with it's white interior, linen table cloths, fine table ware and wooden floors, is far removed from the more traditional Indian restaurants in the area, and the staff are smartly dressed and attentive, if a little formal and unsmiling. The clientele, on a thursday night when we visited, are mostly business types who look well fed and used to fine dining and the whole atmosphere seems, well, flashy.

Flashy is not necessarily a bad thing and we found ourselves ordering a glass of champagne and a Manhattan cocktail, not our usual drinks order for dinner. The service wa a little slow to start with but warmed up quickly, the drinks were good, although the Manhattan wasn't laced with quite enough Bourbon for Joff.

The food was very good indeed, we ordered two starters and both were fresh tasty and unusual, the Bhuney Aloo aur Mutter ki Tikki being the best, a stack of little potato cakes, stuffed with vegetables and served with a yoghurt and tamarind sauce. It was full of flavour, delicately cooked and beautifully presented. The main courses were of the same quality and although they looked small the food here is rich so we found ourselves very full at the end, I could only manage one out of four of the chocolates that came with the bill and I love chocolate (also my husband really dislikes it so I face no competition in the eating of it). Joff's main course was full of wonderful looking mushrooms and the other dishes used ingredients not often used in Indian cooking, well not in the restaurants I have visited anyway, for example wild boar and lamb chops. There are excellent vegetarian choices which means we cna both visit again without having to have the same thing, a peril of vegetarian dining.

we left full, happy and agreeing we would come again. It isn't cheap, the bill was £62 for two starters, two main courses, a side order of dal, a glass of champagne and a Manhattan. However, if you are looking for something different with smart surroundings and beautifully cooked food, this is the place to come. And if anyone ever suggests that you go on a blowout to The Red Fort suggest this instead.

The National Gallery cafe

The National Cafe is the Peyton and Byrne venture inside the National Gallery, it has been there for a year or perhaps more but I visited for the first time last week. It is beautifully designed, a little like having a slap up lunch in a library or the dining room in an old country house. We visited the cafe, which is attached to the brasserie, which also looks good and may warrant a visit soon.

The centre piece of the cafe is a large dresser like table covered in cakes and pastries from which you help yourself, using a pleasingly old fashioned cake slice. The cakes are all homemade looking and unimpeded by wrapping of any sort, so the effect is that of visiting an enthusiastic Aunt's house for tea and being invited to help yourself to whatever you want, which cleverly allows you to forget you will actually have to pay for it when you reach the counter. The sandwiches are fresh and made with good dense bread, I had pitta bread, hummus and tomato and onion salad, all of which was lovely, the hummus tasting pleasingly tahini filled.

Once you have loaded your plates with cake and paid you can either sit at a table or perch on a stool at a bar which gives you a surprisingly entertaining view of the cake stand and allows you to watch other people loading their plates with cake. All in all it was a pleasing experience and I have already chosen three more types of cake to try which means I will need to go back at least three more times (the giant fig rolls look particularly exciting).

Rosso Pomodoro

Rosso Pomodoro is an Italian chain of restaurants with a branch in Covent Garden. There is an important distinction from a chain of Italian restaurants and an Italian chain of restuarants, Rosso Pomodoro started life in Italy and there are branches in Milan, Rome and Naples as well as many other Italian cities and they now have 3 in London, which means that they pride themselves in providing authentic Italian food with quality ingredients. I realise that these phrases are over used and that most restaurants now claim to use quality ingredients, however Rosso Pomodoro also claims to be part of the slow food movement (10 of their dishes use slow food ingredients) which means that they use ingredients from producers who grow rare or threatened varieties of certain foods in a way that protects the environment and at a price that is fair to the grower. The rest of the food they use comes mainly from 6 trusted suppliers.

This all sounds very earnest and right on but actually translates into delicious, fresh, beautifully cooked food with it's roots in Naples. The tomatoes are exceptional and the olive oil is excellent. There is not a huge range of dishes but I think that this is one of their strengths, most dishes come, not surprisingly, with tomatoes in some form, the main choices being pasta, pizza and a few meat or fish dishes. This is presumably because they limit their ingredients to those that they consider to be top quality. Pasta is handmade, pizzas are cooked in a firewood oven and taste somehow unlike any other pizza I have had in this country service is friendly and efficient. the decor reflects the name and is mostly tomato red and white. On one recent visit someone in our party sent their pasta dish back as it was not very hot, it was immediately taken off the bill and she was offered anything else she might like free of charge.

Rosso Pomodoro is a good quality Italian restaurant with just enough of a difference to make it stand out from the sea of other pizza restaurants in the capital. It offers good vegetarian choices and the best tomatoes I have eaten in London.