Fusion proves absurdly good

On the face of it, naming a restaurant after a book by Albert Camus, the French existentialist, is a slightly odd idea.

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus was one of the pioneers of absurdism, the belief that life is fundamentally meaningless.

Apart from L'Etranger - usually translated as The Outsider - his oeuvre includes such pessimistic titles as The Plague, The Myth of Sysiphus and The Fall.

I can understand why a group of politically minded punk rockers would want to name their band after one of Camus' books, but a restaurant? It's a tad pretentious.

The explanation is that the owner, like Camus, was born in Algeria. Ibi Issolah graduated in law from the University of Algiers, went on to get a masters degree from the Sorbonne, and maintains that if he'd stayed in Algeria he would have become a high court judge by the age of 30.

No doubt that's true, but he chose to come to London instead and pursue a career as a restaurateur. He started at the bottom - as a barman at the Cafe Royal - and worked his way up to become general manager of the Atlantic Bar & Grill. L'Etranger, which opened in 2003, is his first solo venture.

From a design point of view - the firm responsible is Andy Martin Associates - L'Etranger is light and airy, in spite of being reasonably compact.

No doubt it helped that, when I went there on a Tuesday lunchtime, only half the tables were filled, but I gather it's packed in the evenings. It attracts an older, moneyed crowd drawn from the residential streets off Gloucester Road. (One regular described the typical L'Etranger customer as a French sugar trader with a holiday home in Mauritius.) Rather predictably, the man at the table next to mine had his mobile permanently glued to his ear.

When I ran my eyes down the menu my first thought was: "Oh no. Not another Nobu knock-off." But a closer inspection revealed that a considerable amount of thought had gone into it.

The head chef, Jerome Tauvron, cooks a combination of Japanese and French food, so in addition to black cod, the menu includes slow-cooked lamb on a bed of aubergine and an unlikely trio of lavender, saffron and wasabi creme brulees.