A breath of fresh air

Matilda is the new pub from Charlie McVeigh - the handsome, bearded mountain-climbing posh boy who gave West London the Grand Union, a real-ale and pie pub with the finest view of Westbourne Bus Depot in all Christendom.

I like it so much that this year I had my birthday shandies there (real-ale shandy is the elderflower cordial of your fashionable social drinker). McVeigh has also had a big hand in the West London institutions Bush Bar & Grill and Woody's.

McVeigh goes South this time, and Matilda breathes fresh air into a pedestrian stretch of Battersea Bridge Road. The front bar - where regulars drink Adnams and posh continental lagers - is white, light and has a smart, dark wood floor. It's like a pub by Persil.

Out back there's a dining room with brown leather booths and trendy Cole's wallpaper. They have called the place a pub-diner, which is a nice dilution of the words - pub-diner feels jazzy, brunchy, clean, it shifts overtly boozy or foodie overtones.

McVeigh has teamed up with an old manager, Luca Meddi, and the menu is simple, but not obvious, Italian. There are three starters, three pastas and four 'Matilda boards' --various combinations of cured meats and cheese served with pickles and savoury jellies. There are six items from the char-grill.

A delightful waitress wearing a T-shirt that said '99% Bouncy' served us. It was excessively outré of me to comment on how apt the slogan across her chest was. Unreserved apology.

Right. The food. A salad of grilled Tomino cheese, apples and walnuts went down well with Ant - her beau had an OK mussels with garlic, chilli and white wine. I had lardo, the dish that is simply sliced cured fat on toast.

The lardo was not quite sliced thinly enough and the toast not warm enough to slightly melt it - the thing that makes cold fat palatable. Grilled scamorza (aged mozzarella) with pumpkin was a pleasing dish.

Risotto of pumpkin and gorgonzola was unforgivably not al dente, the gorgonzola taste was faint, the pumpkin not quite strongly flavoured enough, and so, overall, it was plain. But Chicken breast with roasted peppers was simply spot on. For pudding we shared a grape-bread cake which was bitter with its burnt sugar crust - I couldn't work out if that was intentional or not.

The service is excellent, the environment inviting, the menu user-friendly, but, for us, the cooking and ingredients needed work for this place to be great. I'll return in a few weeks, after they've settled down, and then, I expect Matilda to be a right little goer.

Matilda
74-76 Battersea Bridge Road, SW11