Make time for a trip to Timo

This review was published in May 2002

I have always been fond of the far end of Kensington High Street, just before it gets to Olympia.

At last, someone else has cottoned on to the area and a couple of restaurants have been plonked there, among them an Italian called Timo. It's competent, modish and appealing (both from a gustatory and aesthetic point of view). It doesn't set out to redefine the boundaries of Italian food in London, merely to deliver fairly priced, well-prepared modern Italian food.

The interior is pale, inoffensively modern and makes the most of a long, narrow room. Customers too are pale, modern and make the most of limited clothing allowances to put across a look best described as Bond Street on a budget.

The food is rather better. For instance, a cuttlefish salad with French beans, olives and tomatoes arrived in an artfully dishevelled little mound (the gastro-equivalent of bedhead hair) draped with ribbons of tender, translucent cuttlefish. That old trat fave mozzarella con melanzane was subtly reinvented for the modern age with little spheres of bufala mozzarella atop some discs of aubergine, slightly marred by the fava bean pur?e which looked like it had been squirted from a tube of toothpaste.

Chargrilled swordfish with chicory hearts was a dish for grown-up lunching ladies, the teasing bitterness of the chicory proving a good partner to a surprisingly flavoursome chunk of swordfish. It was good, if not breathtakingly original, and as such, it was typical of the list of main courses and the pitch of the restaurant. There's a tad too much pan-frying going on: salmon, sea bream and sea bass were all offered this way, which strikes me as unimaginative and predictable.

However, you could argue that it balances out the chef's predilection for hearty dishes: a daily special of lamb; fillet of beef with polenta, red onions and red wine sauce; and calf's sweetbread with sweet and sour sauce. The last item is, I imagine, listed as a concession to the chef's creativity and is probably outnumbered many times by the amount of pan-fried fish that leaves the kitchen.

Time was of the essence, so we didn't linger over pudding - not that there seemed to be anything wrong with such imaginative dishes as gnocchi with hazelnut and banana.