Locanda Locatelli

Securing a table is the only discordant aspect of the whole Locanda Locatelli experience, but you can hardly expect competition for dining space in one of the capital's top venues for Italian cucina to be slack. To think of Giorgio Locatelli's extremely chic Mayfair temple of Italian culinary arts as a simple 'locanda' requires a leap of imagination: the place has its own entrance by the side of the Hyatt Regency Churchill Hotel away from the madding crowds of Oxford Street, and the David Collins-designed interior has burnished parquet floors, textured wooden walls, beige leather bucket chairs and booths that ooze curvy retro-styled class. The front-of-house team too are some of the slickest operators in town, calmly and confidently cruising the floor and happy to chat knowledgeably about the food and wine. Locatelli is a man who has a real, deeply-felt instinct for the disarmingly-understated, ingredients-led cooking that produces Italian cuisine at its most unforgettable. A salad of leaves, carrot and bottarga arrives as angel-hair-fine grated carrot, perfectly dressed salad, and dried and salted grey mullet roe that sprinkles magic onto humble ingredients. Main course brings a peasant dish of veal kidneys with stewed lentils and mashed potato, each element delivering maximum impact from clear, perfectly-judged intensity of flavour. A tasting of gold-standard Amedei chocolate brings the curtain down with a flourish of masterful technique: a cannelloni-like roll of pastry filled with bitter chocolate mousse and foam sits alongside a cube of milk chocolate parfait, and white chocolate ice cream. Last word has to go to the wine list which is a masterclass in Italian regional stars with a jaw-dropping battalion of Barolos.