Maquis makes its mark on W6

This restaurant review was published in November 2001.

The last time a swanky new restaurant opened in W12, the Bush Bar and Grill, London erupted in a frenzy of excitement. 'Da Bush' was hailed as the residential quartier of choice of the metropolitan elite.

A number of articles, mainly written by journalists fortunate to number a W12 postcode among their list of status symbols, praised the area to Olympian heights; heights topped off with the maraschino cherry of a domestic goddess, the sainted Nigella.

I have lived in W12 for almost 15 years and the tone of this hype took me by surprise; it made my 'manor' sound like a cross between Byzantium at the time of Constantine the Great and Carnaby Street during the Swinging Sixties. Moreover the hype was nothing if not selective, there was nothing like this fuss when Nando's opened on Uxbridge Road.

It may be Shepherd's Bush is getting blas? or maybe because Hammersmith Grove is more genteel than 'da Bush', but there has been less hullabaloo about the opening of Maquis.

As is the fashion these days, Maquis was opened before building work had been properly completed; thus although it had walls and windows, there was no fascia. I presume, too, that the deli mentioned on the bill will eventually occupy the rubble and tool-filled room into which I stumbled while looking for the gents.

Trendily incomplete state aside, the place has already managed to capture the sense of being a neighbourhood restaurant, in that on the night I went, many customers knew each other. There was a fair smattering of MILTs (Mums in Leather Trousers) and their husbands (untucked Paul Smith with specs); a party of trashily glamorous Middle Easterners (who I would have thought were a bit Lamborghini for the area); and the standard roster of averagely pretty young people (she in ruffled retro Eighties and fishnets; he unshaven, affecting heavy knit - brow and sweater - and carefully tousled demeanour).

The place was also full, indicating that although in my experience the PR campaign has been sotto voce, the word has got around. But what has been saved on hype has clearly been spent on lighting.

Maquis is lit up like a lighthouse, with illumination from spots, uplighters and chandeliers so harsh and unforgiving that the place is unmissable from quite a way down this noble boulevard and positively injurious to the eyes at close range. This enhances the stark look of the place: just a big room with a bar in one corner, some banquettes and plenty of tables. It sends out signals that say 'neighbourhood dining room' rather than 'destination restaurant'. It put me in mind of a sparsely furnished saloon bar in a Western.

The food, however, is deceptively simple and far more cleverly subtle than the location and decoration suggest. Instead of the standard, foolproof gastropub-type menu, the food at Maquis seems to be a clever take on Sixties and Seventies notions of bourgeois French food. There are snails, grilled oysters, fillets of sole in chanterelle, prawn and cider sauce, petit sal?; oeufs a la neige, pruneaux d'Agen and coquilles St Jacques.

'Coquilles St Jacques' - how charmingly dated. The orthodox modern line on diver-caught - soooo important that 'diver-caught' - scallops is to describe them as 'seared', 'griddled' or 'roasted' and then serve them with a dollop of pea pur?e or some bits of bacon. Instead, Maquis presents them in their shells, on top of a light and delicious mushroom duxelle, with - get this - a surround of piped mashed potato. In fashion terms, I can only liken this to a ra ra skirt and legwarmers - it is so fashion forward as to be open to misunderstanding and, were it done badly, it would be nothing more than a bad joke. Happily, like all the things we ate, especially the roast rack of lamb with salsify and pumpkin gratin, it was carried off in an assured yet understated manner.

However the real bit of culinary time travel comes with the cheese fondue made with cider and aged gruyere - the sort of thing that more gastronomically adventurous households were toying with during the Sixties and Seventies. It is a bold stroke to take a ski-chalet classic and pitch it into a fashion-conscious West London restaurant. But to judge from the many bubbling cauldrons of melted cheese being ferried around this over-bright dining room, it was greeted much as one might embrace an old schoolfriend with whom one was once close but who has been missing for the past 20 years.