Bridging the poverty gap

London nowadays reminds me a little of New York in the early Eighties. Back then, that city offered remarkable contrasts of glamour and scenes of deprivation that made Hogarth's Gin Lane look pleasantly suburban. Areas that were once No Go suddenly became SoHo.

Butlers Wharf is symptomatic of this New York effect. It is one of those things that has sprung up over the past ten years in what used to be an unprepossessing locale. If, like me, you have not been to Butlers Wharf for a year or so, you will hardly recognise the place. On a balmy summer evening, it teeters dangerously on the brink of becoming another Covent Garden, although it has not quite reached the stage where street performers and vendors of pseudo-folkloric tourist tat circulate among the punters. It already boasts an Ask pizza and a vast All Bar One. Although both are fine establishments in their own way, I would not necessarily direct you to either of them. Should you want to get the best out of Butlers Wharf, do as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did and book a window table at Le Pont de la Tour.

This is the sort of restaurant that makes one glad to live in London. Just driving there along the Thames on a summer evening - the last rays of sunlight glinting off the glass-clad tower blocks opposite Millbank - is a night out in itself.

Pont is what my date, a friend from university who has become a feminist playwright (think a female Patrick Marber), dubbed a 'toney' establishment - a place with tone, or class. Toney sums up Pont rather well: this is a Conran restaurant that manages to deliver a slick, expensive and glamorous night out without being remotely pretentious. I would have thought that Pont is one of the places of which Sir Terence is particularly proud; it has become a landmark site in a very short period of time, and is the nucleus of that neologism known as the gastrodrome, a concept that has become a part of life in London over the past decade. There is a democracy about Pont that makes the place accessible to everyone, or at least everyone who can afford to drop around a ton a head on dinner with good wine. To judge from the extremely busy restaurant, this socio-economic group is a large one.

But then, it is easy to see why Pont is popular with the moderately civilised and highly paid Square Miler. With the kitchen purring away contentedly in the background and, in the foreground, a delightful amuse-gueule comprising a shot glass of gazpacho and a parmesan-crusted cone of tuna, Pont sets out its stall as contemporarily smart with just enough formality to invoke a sense of occasion.

Food at Pont is not quite as hifalutin as at that other Conran fave, Bibendum. Pont is really a turbo-charged, super-smart brasserie; nevertheless, I've always been pleasantly surprised by the lunches and dinners I have eaten here. If restaurants were cars, then Bibendum would be an Aston Martin and Pont would be a near-top-of-the-range Audi: a smooth, reliable and consistent executive favourite that irons out bumps and is unlikely to dish up any nasty surprises.

Customers are an executive bunch, too, although not all - specifically the John Prescott lookalike occupying the terrace table in front of me - have the aerodynamic styling of an Audi. However, in spite of the tendency of the Prescott doppelg?nger's ample frame to obscure most of Tower Bridge and a fair bit of the Tower Thistle Hotel on the opposite bank of the Thames, it's difficult not to be seduced by the view.

Many restaurants would and could quite happily coast along, with this world-class view compensating for drab food. Happily, this is not the case at Pont. I had no complaints about my dressed Dorset crab with spiced avocado and gazpacho dressing, while my friend made short work of her half lobster. My main course of pan-fried fillet of seabass, saffron boulang?re and cucumber dressing was also a good choice. I normally tend to order without any sense of harmony, this dish however carried on the theme of summery lightness that had commenced with the gazpacho and tuna tartare and continued with the dressed crab.

This stylistic synergy was enhanced by a quite brilliant use of saffron, a spice for which I have an inordinate fondness. My friend even stopped reminiscing about her karate dinners with another college contemporary, BBC anchorperson Fiona Bruce, for long enough to commend the wild asparagus that accompanied her saut?ed fillet of sole with scallops.

Our plates having been cleared away by attentive staff, barely had my companion started on me with details of her new smash hit, Eskimo Sisters, and its debut on the West End stage, when a delightful, golf-ball-sized scoopette of breed-specific apple sorbet appeared, sandwiched delicately between two slivers of the said fruit.