Bet your bottom dollar

Lots of young restaurateurs seem to have sex on the brain at the moment. Apartment 195's fabulously sexy waitresses wear underwear as outerwear, Bob Carlos Clarke nudes of Caprice hang at FireHouse, and there's Tom Etridge's Helmut Newton-style posh smut at the Ebury, Jasper Gorst's sexy burlesque at the Oak, Justin Carter's naked ladies on the wall at the Shoreditch Elbow Room, and that mural at Conran's Plateau.

$ Grills And Martinis (loving that name) has a black-and-white photo of a pouting drag queen, which qualifies as sexy for some. It has lots of other very now aspects, such as original German futurist light fittings, mirrored tables, leather panels, extremely low lighting, bespoke martinis and tonnes of shellfish. $ ticks a lot of hip boxes.

As we walked in on a Saturday night, we felt instantly good. 'Easy calm', photographer Derek calls it, that feeling when you walk into a place feeling rubbish and instantly feel, 'No, it's OK, this place is happening, so I must be too.' Then we noticed the parties. Whatever joys we were to discover were hobbled by two long tables of happy people. Call me a miserabilist, but I don't like parties. Sometimes we all need to book a table for 16, but, a bit like sex, it's rather gross when you see others at it. Parties look so naff. They are what private rooms should be for.

The food was largely medium to good - simple dishes that were reasonably priced. The Serrano ham, which came with deep-fried mozzarella, was too straight from the chiller to expose its sweet charms. Tomato soup was flavourful and bold, and had a texture which suggested nicely its constituent parts. The Caesar salad was fine but had too great a quantity of romaine lettuce to enjoy all its other more exciting elements.

They did that posh restaurant thing of keeping the wine in a bucket more than an arm's length from the table, which can be annoying in a relaxed, busy place like this. The mains were uniformly good. The sirloin steak was tasty, tender and juicy, grilled lobster came not quite warm and was beautifully cooked to soft, yielding perfection - the tomato vinaigrette that came with it was OK, but did not enhance the flesh particularly. Grilled wild salmon was perfectly cooked too.

We tried all of their four puddings. Caramelized pecan pie was ace, with a delicious shortcake-style pastry, knickerbocker glory and a chocolate cake were ordinary, and fruit salad with Cointreau was a complete booze-soaked no-no, unless you like finding fruit in your liqueur.

The chef had a thing for deepfrying herbs - there was even some deep-fried mint on my knickerbocker glory - but other than that he was neither attempting to draw attention to himself nor trying to exceed his abilities, which I am always grateful for.

I like this place and I am sure it will be a popular addition to Exmouth Market's lively mix of restaurants and bars. We decided that in recent years Exmouth Market has become like Battersea Village: a safe and middle-class gateway en route to the wilds of London's more extreme social enclaves. Then we decided we were getting far too pretentious and went home.

$ Grills & Martinis
Exmouth Market, London, EC1R 4PX