A bad Italian job

I am surprised more gastropubs don't lean more heavily on Italian dishes. As a cuisine, its ingredients can be kept cheap and it lends itself to rough, scrubbed wooden tables and bottles of plonk.

Prada Elaine came to The Abbey Road Pub And Dining Room with me, where there is an entirely Italian menu, possibly the only all-Italian gastromenu in town. This place was once painted entirely black and was called the The Salt House - now it has bare boards, Venetian mirrors and arty foreign posters framed and arranged a bit wonkily on duck egg blue walls.

'That's a heritage colour,' Elaine said, knowingly, being a woman who knows about pigment and how to find the right shade of white. We stared at the walls for a while and fondled the waxy, exotic table flower. 'Someone's put some thought into this. I like it. What a nice place to hang out.' The clever and amusingly irreverent Polish waiter told us there was a new partner in the business, hence the redecoration.

'There's the same Italian chef here, though,' the waiter said, before adding, 'I hate Italians, too much attitude.' We ate some home-made foccacia, warm, studded with tomatoes and crunchy salt - a bit too doughy and not enough richly olive oily, but only a pedant bitches about fresh bread unless it's really rubbish.

Elaine had duck carpaccio. The carpaccio was invented (or rather seared red beef was renamed) at Harry's Bar in Venice (like the wheel and the bellini) in 1961, and was so-called because the Renaissance painter Carpaccio used a lot of red in his work, and this was the colour of the seared beef that originally made up the dish.

The thin slices of very cold, medium-cooked duck presented on a gauche pile of baby spinach didn't quite do the original justice, but it was not bad. Tuscan bean soup was more like tomato porridge in texture due to an overzealous, or overthrifty use of pearl barley. Its flavours were lacking, and it was only just warm which was disappointing - the words piping hot belong next to soup.

My tagliatelle with rabbit and wild mushrooms was fair, but lacking that slowcooked depth of flavour that would have made the dish. Elaine's main course arrived, and was, 'really not nice'.

Turbot cooked in foil was grey, greasy, slimy - the sauce a muddy puddle with mushrooms and potato. We both poked it around a bit, tasted it a few times, discussed, and then sent it back. We didn't want our money back, we just wanted something different.

The manageress said, accusingly, that it had been eaten, and asked me to explain exactly what was wrong with it. I did. She then told me that was just my opinion. The replacement was linguine with half a sautéed lobster with an unremarkable sauce of tomatoes and chilli.

The home-made (I guess) pasta was cooked just so, the lobster was not overcooked. I stole a share and the plating on the claw-crackers came off on my hands - grimy, grey and metallic. That'll teach me to be a greedy thief. We split a chocolate torte, bitter with cocoa and pleasantly dry.

We could do with a decent Italian gastropub, but this one is only halfway there.

The Abbey
63 Abbey Road, NW8