A new era of simple pleasures

I've recently eaten so many mediocre meals in newly opened restaurants that I've lost count. I don't write about all of them. I do try to protect you. It started after getting back from Greece at the beginning of July. Doubtless anyone returning from a holiday, unless it was in Tokyo, finds London restaurant prices freshly hard to stomach. But when, again and again, a lot of money buys an indifferent experience, you wonder how the restaurant business can survive.

Penne all'arrabbiata dusted with so much chilli powder that it is rendered inedible plus a waitress who puts on the Norah Jones CD for the third time running because she happens to like it don't encourage repeat business.

A French chef in a north London gastropub hasn't turned into Jean-Georges Vongerichten by dint of chucking Eastern spices any old how into almost everything.

Even if the chefs in a West End Thai restaurant allegedly worked for Thai royalty it doesn't excuse stale, fat-drenched food garnished with a long black hair. I could go on. But then suddenly a restaurant opens that restores one's faith in life.

Ottolenghi in Islington belongs to a new dawn, a way forward in eating that strips away pretension and guile and puts in their place integrity and equality, while serving spiffing meringues.

The communal tables won't appeal to the sort of diner who sets great store by sitting in the most prestigious spot. The preponderance of salads might strike some as dangerously virtuous and the self-help element implied by the Kitchen Aid toasters powered by dangling white telephone flex might affront those who go to a restaurant to be waited on reverentially.

The beauty of the food on display might disappoint anyone who likes art to have an expensive signature and investment value, but Ottolenghi's philosophy of serving "food that is totally un-industrialised" is a joy to experience and to behold.

The setting is serene: two long white tables in a white room with light streaming in from both ends. Sculpted white chairs are surprisingly comfortable. On the tables, a wooden board with home-made jams and a jar of butter point to breakfasts past of warm toast made from bread cooked below in the bakery set up by dough wizard Dan Lepard.

At lunchtime, when I visited, the salads that you see so beautifully displayed near the entrance are served in various combinations and sizes and as an accompaniment to fish and meat dishes such as the delectable roasted free-range chicken leg flavoured with mint, garlic, paprika and lemon zest that I chose.

Ottolenghi is an Italian-Jewish, presumably originally Sephardic, family name. Matthew Fort in his recently published book Eating Up Italy (Fourth Estate, £16.99) describes meeting Signora Adriana Ottolenghi in an 18th century synagogue in Casale Monferrato.