Pleasing the natives

It's been a long time since I've seen as many people smoking in a restaurant as there were in Rosa's Dining Room. The punters here are painfully groovy, mostly young and dramatically loud, and chugging away at the old tabs as though their lives depended on it. Of course, this corner of the forest is groovester central - Tom Conran's The Cow is a few doors down, as are The Westbourne and The Store, a hip wee deli and coffee shop.

Since Rosa's is on the twilight side of darkly lit, the smoke added to the curious sinister-but-cosy ambience.

Only the cheerful helpfulness of our cute blonde waitress and the searing strip lighting pouring from the open kitchen door alleviated the gloom.

This used to be called Lola's Kitchen - maybe the name changed to differentiate it from Lola's in Islington, an entirely different animal - and there have been reports of Geri Halliwell sightings. Nonetheless, the hipness quotient seems to have survived. When we arrived just after 8pm the place was deserted; when we left towards 11pm, it was buzzing; the natives here are clearly a nocturnal lot.

Owner Rupert Baird-Murray has kept things simple: tables are covered in floral oilcloths; there are black and white photos on the dark gloss walls; tea-lights putter in the dimness. And the menu reflects the no-frills approach - don't come here expecting to be wowed. Pint glasses of Dorset prawns come with lemon and mayo, mussels come with chips and mayo, ribeye steak comes with chips, salad and Bearnaise. You get the idea.

And I think this is all pretty savvy; after all, this is the kind of thing you want from a neighbourhood restaurant, even if it is in a rarefied neighbourhood. A midweek tea, like ours was, doesn't need to come with bells and whistles.

Everything we ate was competently executed and reasonably priced (even more reasonable on early weekdays when all main courses cost £10). Some things were better than we expected, like my pumpkin gnocchi with Parmesan and sage butter. Initially, these seemed bland, but with each mouthful I found myself warming to their nutty, buttery subtlety; it was with some surprise that I realised my plate was empty.

Also good were little 'cod cakes' with a properly punchy a'oli; their title reflects Rosa's unassuming nature: these were so fluffy and light they could have quite reasonably called themselves beignets. And in somewhere more pretentious, probably would.

Other dishes didn't quite cut the mustard: chicken liver parfait lacked the silkiness desirable in this most refined of pates; it had a good depth of flavour but an off-putting granularity: not sieved, I'd guess. And a slow-roasted lamb shank with artichokes was on the knife-resistant side of tough, resulting in a comical, Fred Flintstone-style bout of bone wrestling for my date.

Following the pattern of the rest of the meal, we had a good pud - a velvety creme brulee, and a rather pedestrian one - an uncrumbly crumble of deeply ordinary apples.

Perhaps this might seem like an awful lot of navel-gazing about a neighbourhood restaurant; and one not pretending to be anything else. Maybe it is. But a local that appears to be as beloved by its funky set of regulars as Rosa's properly does the job it sets out to do. Which is a whole lot more than can be said for any number of high-profile launches in our novelty-seeking city.

Our meal was mostly fine and dandy, we felt comfortable in the surroundings, there was plenty of eye candy of both sexes and we were treated extremely well. Our bill, with wine, was around £60. What's not to like? Unless you're a member of the anti-smoking brigade, of course.