Perseverance has its reward

I'm no fan of the traditional British pub; all this nostalgia about ancient, smelly, barfly-infested gaffs dispensing bad drinks and populated by lugubrious drinkers seems to me at best misguided and at worst positively reactionary.

Strip 'em out, I say - just as long as you don't turn them into yet another Slug And Lettuce. So I was positively looking forward to the reinvention of The Perseverance, in Lamb's Conduit Street, a typically uninspiring example of its kind.

The new owners, whose background is very much in style bars not old boozers (they were behind Soho's seminal Riki Tik), have been remarkably restrained in their refurb. There's nothing here that would alarm the most existential pubophile: it's all dark wood, little decoration to lift the impression of vague melancholy; in fact, the only immediate clues to the transformation are the linen napkins on the tables and the young, attractive staff.

Read the menu, however, and you rapidly realise how much things have changed. There's not a pie or a pickled egg in sight. We had hoped that the extraordinarily delicious smell of toasted garlic that permeates Lamb's Conduit Street was emanating from The Perseverance; sadly, it was coming from Cigala across the road but it did make us order garlic-laden food in a kind of Pavlovian response.

A chicken Caesar salad boasted fabulously crisp, fresh scoops of little gem lettuce generously anointed with an excellent dressing rich with egg and parmesan; silver marinated anchovies (not the traditional fiercely salty tinned jobs); crisp croutons; and good, flavourful chargrilled breast of chicken. The prosaically titled leek and potato soup was actually a far more soignée vichysoisse, delicate and creamy.

Main courses were just as good: baby chicken (one that had evidently enjoyed its brief life) came in a very light broth studded with celeriac and managed a crispy top with moist underpinning. It also came with the best, butteriest fondant potato I've had in years - a real achievement.

Thick, rosy and tender slabs of roast leg of lamb (this was a Sunday lunchtime, an occasion celebrated by The Perseverance) sat on top of caramelised carrots and improbably meaty jus and was flanked by a cloud of brilliant mash. I hate to think how much butter and cream went into it. Dotted around were vast, pink whole cloves of garlic; these were the only slight disappointment - they hadn't been roasted long enough to liquefy their contents into that decadent spread that goes so fabulously with roast lamb and as a result made me impossible to get close to for the next couple of days. It also came with mint sauce made by messrs Coleman; this isn't the intuition of an educated palate, I saw the waitress purchasing a couple of jars from the corner shop.

A chocolate fondant - that most current of puddings - took forever to arrive but the speed with which it was demolished indicated it was well worth the wait.

Not only is the food good and reasonably priced but the natives - a youngish, well-set-up kind of crowd, many of them staff from the nearby Great Ormond Street hospital - are friendly too. We got into conversations with tables to either side of us in that relaxed, Sunday sort of way while our children attempted to play with the traffic. Borrow a couple of sprogs and sleep off lunch while they play in Coram's Fields at the top of the road (adults unaccompanied by children aren't allowed) and you have the ingredients for a stunning Sunday afternoon.

The Perseverance
63 Lambs Conduit Street, WC1N 3NB