Le Petit Prince

On a recent yoga retreat, my supple pipe-cleaner chums and I followed up our rigorous three-hour yoga sessions with yurt-sized portions of vegetarian food. We binged on pulses, feminist cheese (no udders molested in its making), bricks of rye bread and humanely slaughtered veg. I blew back into town with flexible hips and a salivating bloodlust for a hunk of animal ass.

Hip hooray, then, that I was reviewing Le Petit Prince, a little bistro in Kentish Town. Everything about this sitting-room-sized restaurant is so French. The menu is the Frenchiest thing, right down to its scribbly font and the vegetarian dishes cooked in meat stock. The French pile in from all over London, a typically good sign. The place is themed around Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, the philosophical fairy tale for grown-ups, with copies from Arabic to Russian strung across the room on string, and the walls decorated in pastiches of Saint-Exupéry's illustrations. The owners, Michel Dilg and Francine Lecomte, are French literature teachers by profession and opened the place in the Seventies. They went back to France after seven years, only to return because they could not bear to see what the subsequent owners had done to their 'leetle prince'.

Francine does the cooking, and bloody well. She cooks the dishes she learnt from her mother, which roughly means Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking plus 12 different North African couscous dishes. I've heard her cassoulet is the real deal version of Toulouse - lots of animal fat and hours of waiting and preparation.

We shared some escargot. I felt the need to be a proper critic and asked where they came from. 'A teen,' said Michel, pragmatically. Juicy, bouncy, buttery and garlicky, they did their job of providing hot butter for scraps of baguette. Afterwards I had an endive tarte tatin. It came bitter, sweet and buttery, with soft discs of strong chèvre. The man had a soupe du pêcheur, a strong fishy stock with a dash of pastis. Too often I eat dandy modern fish soups and feel, frankly, cheated on the fish part. This version wasn't fragrant, it was a raging out-ofthe-closet fishy knockout.

As you may be able to tell, both the man and I were falling in love with this place. I had couscous royal - of lamb cutlets braised with hard merguez sausage. It was half the price and just as good as Momo. The man had magret de canard au miel.

'Ohmigod, that's good,' he said of the blushing little slivers of duck breast with a honey sauce and a rough nutty brown potato pancake and a 'truly carroty cloud' of mousse in the middle. 'I want to come here every Sunday for the rest of my life.'

My only criticism is that the room is cold looking and the tableclothes are papery. But at these prices, I'm not gonna bang on about it. Individual and loveable places like this are worth 20 hype-and-hoopla, bank-breaking West End temples. We drank a bottle of '97 St Emillion, had coffee, a cheap and cheery calvados and some of Francine's nougat glacé. The bill barely tipped over £50.