A taste of Italian mediocrity

This review was first published in August 2000

I have very fixed tastes. If I want a cigar I go to see Edward Sahakian at Davidoff. If I want a suit I go to Terry Haste at Huntsman. If I want a pair of shoes I try to find Eric Cook. If I want a plate of green prawns I go to Mr Chow.

When it comes to Italian restaurants I am even more horrifically biased, prejudiced and partisan than usual.

If I want to eat Italian food I go to see Andrea Riva. His is my favourite Italian restaurant anywhere in the world - it just happens to be in Barnes. Not everyone gets it: the paper tablecloths, the smoked-glass ashtrays and the weird postal district throw some people. I love it and if it is good enough for Mark Birley, whose Harry's Bar is my next favourite Italian restaurant, then it is more than good enough for me.

However, even if I were not unreasonably biased, I have to say that I would not go out of my way to recommend Al Duca in St James's. As is usually the case, mine is a minority view. I rang to book a table for lunch and was offered the opportunity to eat a late breakfast, at noon, or sit down to an early tea, at 2pm. The later hour suited me fine.

Even though I arrived late, Al Duca was still full. The location, on one of the streets that runs south of Jermyn Street, is good. The site itself is clean, modern and pleasant: pale wood, taupe leather, a touch of mushroom-coloured, swimming-pool-type tiling, little plantpots on the tables - imagine an Italian restaurant available in kit form Ikea.

A substantial portion of the front of the restaurant can be opened to the street, so, given passing traffic, a full house for lunch and the absence of tablecloths and carpets, this is not the place for a quiet midday meal.

Intrinsically, Al Duca is a restaurant that does not offend. The service is good, the food indifferent, the customers, like the design, anonymous enough, the prices are moderate and the character is non-existent. Where the interest of Al Duca and the countless places like it in London today reside is in their popularity. I cannot understand why people should want to visit such an uninteresting restaurant. And then I realised it is because Al Duca, and the places like it, offer a perfectly palatable, anodyne and inoffensive way of spending the lunch hour.

Years ago, St James's, and indeed many parts of London, used to be filled with old-fashioned Italian trattorias. Grizzled waiters in sauce-spattered waistcoats would bear down on one carrying wine lists and menus covered in quilted leatherette, they would brandish preposterously phallic peppermills and would compliment 'la bella signora', before recommending a cream-laden scampi-based dish served on top of a mound of congealed pasta.

Until the late Eighties, this was Italian cuisine in England: all chafing dishes, semi-curtained windows, and allegedly decorative straw-covered Chianti bottles. Then restaurants including Riva and the River Caf?, and later Daphne's and Zafferano, changed the way we ate. We discovered polenta and extra virgin olive oil, aged balsamic vinegar and chargrilled vegetables, sun-drying and pan-roasting.

Italian food became chic, then it became fashionable and now, as Al Duca eloquently demonstrates, it has become a clich?.

Al Duca serves up homogenised, post-rustic Italian fare to press all the buttons that we have become familiar with over the past ten years. There is involti di spada e fagolini (smoked swordfish with French beans), linguini alle vongole, fegato di vitello alla veneziana (pan-fried calves' liver with polenta, roasted red onion and balsamic vinegar). It fairly buzzes with things like pan-fried tuna, chargrilled fillet of sea bass, cipolline (small onions) and different types of pasta.