Local eats: Edera, W11

These are frugal times. It's like wartime out there. Give or take the odd multi-millionpound flashy affair like Sketch, the overthrow of evil dictatorships or the refurbishment of Stoke Park, everyone seems to be running on diesel. But it doesn't seem to have sunk in yet.

You sit at dinner talking about the economy. 'God, the economy's really bad, isn't it?' And then move on to a new subject. 'Anyway, how are you? Skint eh? Me too. What a coincidence! We'll just have the one course then!' It was in the spirit of one course and a bottle of house, please, that my brother, the Dirty Blond and I went to a new modern Italian called Edera.

Frankly, we were worried about eating here, Edera being slap bang in moneybags and Michael Winner country, Holland Park. But Edera is good value for money. Two courses, £16.50, three £19.50, four £22.50, lots of gratis mouth-amusing in-betweens, or assaggio as they call them in Italy, and tasty sweet things with coffee. It's like a smart modern Italian, at reasonably pocket-money prices. The sort of place you can take your mum, unless she's Fay Maschler, and she'll go, 'Oooh, posh innit'.

The staff are professional and warm, the sommelier kind to meagre folk like us. He did not bat an eyelid when I did the cautious trick of asking for a taste of the house red, a montepulciano at £13 and the next one up, a barbera d'asti at £17. The house is respectable, if plonky - the barbera was creamy, full and well worth the extra quids. I liked the wine list, going from £13 to £150 in a very short space - not too much choice for vinignorants like me.

There is good air conditioning - we smoked, no one choked. The olive oil was grassy and smooth and notably delicious. Bugger it, we said, let's have three courses.

First there was a silly performance with a little kebab stuck in a test tube of sauce. The meat was chopped so small that it was tough and tasteless. But our starters went from fine to very good. The very good being a tasty, velvety pigs-head terrine with roasted asparagus and langoustines, and a stuffed squid with parsley salad. A panzanella with roasted monkfish missed the point entirely by making the bread constituent thin and too crispy and the monkfish a little overcooked. On to the pasta course. Grilled Bottarga ravioli with grey mullet carpaccio was a great idea, the crunchy ravioli a treat, but the plate was so hot that the carpaccio element was cooked by the time the plate reached the table. Black ink cannelloni with cuttlefish and sweet chilli was good, but deserved a bigger inky punch. Roasted gnocchi, with sweetbreads and artichoke was an all-round favourite.

The three of us effectively ate nine meals, as we passed plates round within courses. We felt that the £19.50 price tag would only be good if there was a uniform quality to the food. We agreed that many of the dishes were being sent out at the wrong side of warm - tepid is not a recognised flavour-enhancer. Some dishes lacked a distinctive flavour punch, and the fresh ingredients were not of such a high quality as to stand-alone. This was certainly true of the pan-fried beef entrecote with sautéed potatoes and asparagus. It was served in a very modern, angular style, little wedges of rare meat balanced on prettily seared slices of spud, but it just didn't taste beefy enough.

Chicken with artichokes and a sweet garlic veloute, again, was entirely a good dish, but the chicken wasn't, well, chickeny enough. Red sea bream, fennel compote and deep-fried courgette flower saved the day - that lovely treat of a crispy deep-fried flower (when they go soggy they are filthy) filled with something like a dandy's tartar sauce, with matching crispy skin on the fish. Has anyone ever made fish scratchings for these oily fish-obsessed times?

I know these premises well, new ventures here open and close like eyelids - even when they are laudable, they always end up as ghost caffs. But the closure of Chez Moi down the road has left the Shepherd's Bush end of Holland Park without a local restaurant (unless you include the ramshackle Lebanese bang on the roundabout). Perhaps, this time, the spot will thrive. It's part of the Zafferano group now, so there's a bit of knowhow and financial welly behind it. I'll be back to impress my mum on a budget later this month.