Make yourself at home

Kentish Town is an unprepossessing place - it is neither as self-satisfied as Highgate nor as arty as Camden. Shops, restaurants and bars line Kentish Town Road, but this is the sort of place most people drive through on the way to somewhere else.

But for restaurant-goers in Camden, and for the meeja glitterati in nearby Tufnell Park, Kentish Town Road has become a destination in itself simply because it is home to Pane Vino, a long-established neighbourhood favourite.

The dining room is small and pretty ordinary, tables are crammed in, service is familiar and you get treated like family, which is very refreshing. The food is good, too.

Even though Pane Vino makes no claims to be more than a local Italian trattoria, it is one of the better places to eat Sardinian food in London. So saying, the home-made pizzas are majestic. Primavera, £9 (ricotta, broad beans, potatoes and an egg) is large, with a good crust and well heaped.

But that is racing ahead. The antipasti are very good: Antipasto Sardo comes on a large plate, topped with a sheet of crisply thin 'pane casarau' bread, which in turn serves as a base for bottarga - wedges of aged Pecorino cheese, sun-dried tomatoes preserved in oil, a pickled artichoke heart and some Sardinian salame. Very good, very fresh.

Or how about 'bresaola di capra con cipolline al balsamico', a bresaola made with goat meat. Very lean and with a strong, rich flavour - quite different from its beefier cousin. Somewhere along the line the cipolline al balsamico have been supplanted by a mixture of soft, fried onions and rocket, but it is so good that you won't mind when it turns up for a second time with one of the main courses.

As well as the lengthy à la carte - and the 11 different and excellent pizzas - there is a board listing daily specials. Fresh sea urchins with pasta is a delicacy you don't often see even in the smartest restaurants, but at Pane Vino fresh pasta dressed with sea urchin roe is £15 a portion - a bargain.

Also on the specials board is a dish of calves' kidneys billed as coming with a mustard sauce and oyster mushrooms. The kidneys are cooked just so, the mushrooms are good, and the mustard sauce is absent, but there is a dollop of the friedonionand-rocket mix, which works very well.

Also from the specials, 'pacheri' with mussels, large floppy pasta cylinders - as if lengths had been cut from a bicycle inner tube - come with plenty of sweet mussels and a well-judged tomato sauce, not too acid but still rich with tomatoey flavour.

The wine list here is worth a look, especially if you are enthusiastic about Sardinian wines, as it is not often that you get to choose from five different producers or vintages of Cannonau. You could end up with a beautiful bottle of strong, plummy, deep-cherry-red wine for around £25.