European flair

The Dirty Blonde was sitting, grinning as I walked into The Green, holding up a free drink and saying, 'They're very sorry, no dinner at the moment, but they are giving away drinks to make up for it.'

We tried to fashion something like dinner from the tapas they were serving, but did not feel it was fair to judge it on the strength of these alone. The Green went all out to make up for the kitchen's failure to produce dinner - they even delivered a double V&T to the Dirty Blonde pavement-side while we waited for a cab outside.

I returned on a Sunday with two locals - one works in the Observer offices over the road, the other owns bars up the road. The newspaper man said the spacing of the seating means it's bad for working lunches: 'Tables are too close together... you can't scheme here.' Bar fellow says, 'They're doing alright if they're busy, this area's still dead on Sundays.'

The Green is a corner pub with lots of windows. Two floors of the place are given over to a drug- and contemporary culture-influenced collection of art. It's very European in its aims, more of a cafe/bar than a pub.

Fresh, hot bread was brought to the table with oil - always pleasant. It was the part-baked variety I assume from the speed it dried out, but with oats, linseeds and walnuts, it wasn't bread to grumble about. On weekdays there is a gastropub menu, particularly strong on fish. We chose beef, chicken and salmon from their Sunday menu of roasts. Shared bowls of veg came out first - a thoughtful touch.

The potatoes were lacking in the glistening, oven-fresh crunch and moist fondant centre of the home-cooked variety. But roast potatoes are not an ideal restaurant dish and, relatively, these were fine. The newspaperman commented on how hard it was to find a decent roast lunch in this town and we all agreed. This one he said, wasn't half bad - again, we agreed.

Chicken was organic, tasted of chicken (rarer than you think) and a reasonably moist mix of white and brown meat. It came with a big jug of sweet, pale brown chickeny gravy and I rued my choice of rather dry salmon, albeit in a full-on parmesan and tomato sauce. I would have preferred to sit there mashing roast potatoes into that tempting gravy all afternoon. Bizarrely, the beef, a rolled rump, was served with the same gravy as the chicken, which detracted from the fact that it was a decent-tasting piece of meat. Very wrong.

Puddings come as part of the deal, which is what, on balance, makes me like this place - it's a low-stress way of eating, nothing set the tastebuds on fire, but it is a comfortable, welcoming place.

The Green
29 Clerkenwell Green, EC1R 0DU