Bar Trattoria Semplice W1

Just off the top end of Bond Street, a potentially very useful trattoria offshoot of the popular neighbouring Ristorante Semplice; the place seems to have suffered from a curious personality bypass, though, and the food on our visit was very up-and-down.

We were excited when we heard that Ristorante Semplice – a Mayfair Italian restaurant which just received one of our Rémy Martin Awards for the best up-and-comers – was to spring a nearby trattoria offshoot.

You don’t hear much of trattorie nowadays. This simple and jolly style of Italian restaurants was all the rage in London from, say, the mid-’60s to the late-’80s, but they then fell out of fashion. In current conditions, however, one would have thought that a cheap and simple Italian restaurant in Mayfair would have gone down a storm.

Hmm. Why then was this former pub four-fifths empty the Friday lunchtime we visited? Early days, of course, but perhaps it had something to do with the cheerless interior? The contemporary Italian approach to interior design always risks seeming a bit chilly for English tastes, and on a grey London afternoon…

Perhaps another part of the problem is that some of the dishes here (£19.50 tops) really aren’t that cheap, which undermines the basic proposition. It’s a shame, because the home-made pasta – the bedrock, of a compelling trattoria ‘offer’ – is impressive.

Sadly, however, the pasta was the only culinary highlight of our visit. Bread lacked flavour (which is odd, because – unlike your the classic baguette, say – it does seem possible to make good Italian bread in London), and calamari to start were so overdone that they might as well have been dishing up crisps.

But, if you really want a metaphor for what’s wrong with this place, look at the sweet trolley. Don’t get us wrong: we think the pudding trolley, like the trattoria, is a concept that’s due for a major revival. But was there ever a glummer sweet trolley than this one? Six uniformly bland-looking tarts and puddings presented on cold while plates on a trolley unadorned with fruit, flowers or any sign of personality.

Being a party of three, we were, in half-portions, able to sample the whole trolley, and are therefore in an unusually strong position to pronounce that, while by no means bad, the puddings were consistently pretty unexciting.

So, if they’re to make a real go of this place, the management here seems to us to need to buck the food up quite a lot, and also to inject a bit of brio and personality. And perhaps to cut out the top-end dishes too. If people want the full-blown Ristorante experience, there’s a real one almost next door.