Lena EC2

On a difficult Shoreditch site (once Savarone, RIP), an odd-but-interestingly-styled Italian restaurant, with cosy basement bar; our early-days visit found the – perhaps surprisingly conventional – Italian cooking to be of some promise.

It must be really hard opening near the City nowadays. How depressing must it be when just one person comes along to enjoy the very good-value two-course lunch menu (£12.50) on offer at your shiny new Shoreditch restaurant? (And how much more so would it be if you knew that person was there only because he needed to review it?)

It’s easy to equate emptiness with lack of quality, but – on the basis of our admittedly modest sampling – that wasn’t the case at all. Well, certainly not on the food front. It happened that the set menu included many of our ‘touchstones’ for any Italian restaurant. The pasta – simply presented alla pomodoro – had good taste and texture, for example, and the liver alla veneziana, equally simply presented with mash, was cooked just right. Pudding, a couple of slices of crumbly chocolate cake, was above average. And the tiny, intense espresso was pretty good too. Only the bread, perhaps a touch dry, might have been described as ‘moderate’.

As to service, well who’s to say in an all-but-empty restaurant? It was pretty good, considering (if occasionally distracted by workmen still doing the odd bit of snagging).

The site has been a bit of a graveyard in recent times. This is still a two-floor affair, with a cosy bar below. The new interior design of the dining room – decorated, among other things, with sepia photos of the owner’s mama, the eponymous Lena – is of a type that we suspect will take different people different ways. Have a look at the the photograph above, and form your own view. In its rather mannered sort of way, we suspect it might – by night – be quite atmospheric.

And, oh yes, try to imagine it with people.