Good food for the gang

It's over. Gone. No more. That summer holiday feeling must go back in the box until next year. If they ever existed, the blue seas and white beaches are now just a fading memory and the only thing that is fading faster is your tan. Before the murk of autumn and a host of Christmas preparations crowd us into a corner, we should all take one last opportunity to kick up our heels.

Just when you think that no one could possibly squeeze any more trendy bar-eateries into Covent Garden someone opens another. One of the latest entries into this very crowded and bitterly contested marketplace is FIELD AND FOREST on Shorts Gardens, the publicity for which describes it as a "Bar, Grill and Pret".

The takeaway bit is at the top of the stairs on street level and the bar and grill are downstairs in a large space with a vaulted brick roof and a window onto the shops of the Thomas Neil centre. This is a lively place and steers an ambiguous course between being a bar that serves rather good food or a restaurant that has a rather good bar.

There's an open kitchen, a spacious dining area, and for a basement establishment everything seems surprisingly light and fresh - helped by pale paintwork and plenty of lighting. If Teatro offers the kind of cosy intimate lighting that enhances even a hint of tan, for Field and Forest you will need to be St-Tropez bronze as everything is so light and bright.

The menu is short and offers remarkably good value. Plenty of restaurants bang on about the freshness, the naturalness and the rarity of their ingredients as a prelude to making you choose from 12 starters and 15 mains; a shorter menu would give you so much more confidence. At F and F there are 10 dishes in total. Some are starters, some are mains, some could be either. Starters tend to cost under £5 and all the mains, bar one, keep inside the £10 barrier.

For a new, lively, comfortable, trendy sort of place sited within the gastro ant heap that is Covent Garden, this is pretty good news. The kitchen is an open one and you can see the brigade of two cooking your dinner. You can also see them arguing vehemently with the waiting staff over who gets what, where and when.

The waiters are charming, profoundly muddled and somewhat out of their depth. Servicewise, F and F has all the teething troubles you'd expect from somewhere that is obviously still finding its feet. But the food is good and flavour combinations work. Dishes are simply plated and well seasoned. A starter made up of "roast wood Blewit, Parmesan, baby spinach and soft boiled egg" is entirely successful - the mushrooms tasting almost nutty, and the Parmesan-spinach-egg combo working well. "Buffalo mozzarella, tomato, extra virgin olive oil" should be renamed "good buffalo mozzarella, good tomato, good extra virgin olive oil".

A very decent £5.50's worth and one that goes well with the salt crust bread. "Grilled Jerusalem artichokes, rocket, truffle dressing" is also good to eat, if a little heavy-handed with the truffle oil.

Mains are simple and satisfying. Crumbed plaice, pea mash, buttered carrots - wellcooked plaice and the buttery mash which has fresh peas mixed into it.

"Grilled black leg chicken, hot French bean vinaigrette" shows why the French poulet noir commands a premium price - at last a chicken that tastes of something. The most expensive dish is the "grilled Argentinian fillet steak, celeriac slaw £12.75" - a good steak, precisely cooked and with a nice mustardy celeriac remoulade.