Quod it and get inebriated

This review was first published in January 2002.Quod was described to me as Brown's with a Tuscan twist. If ever a description was calculated to chill my bones it would be that.

As an undegraduate at Oxford I made good use of Brown's. It was close to the Oxford & County Secretarial College (the Ox & Cow), the waitresses were pretty, the drinks were very strong (or cheap - I can't quite remember which).

Life was simple in those days before chargrilling and olive-oil drizzling, and side orders ran to things like baked potatoes or salads with blue cheese dressing. Sadly, my enthusiasm for the place got the better of me and I was eventually banned for brawling.

In the decade and a half since I graduated, it has been good to see much loved institutions of the time flourish. The Hon Toby Young has reinvented himself as a 21st-century rapscallion and has already published a volume of memoirs. Boris Johnson has become a much-cherished feature of the national television schedules and a member of the House of Commons. And Brown's has opened Quod on Haymarket. 'We're opposite Tiger Tiger,' chirruped the woman who answered the phone, when I asked exactly where Quod was - I love the idea of Tiger Tiger being considered a landmark.

Quod is plainly not a place that was created with someone like me in mind. It is a noisy concrete-ceilinged cavern. There is a big plate-glassed bar at the front with charming views across the boulevard to Tiger Tiger. The restaurant stretches away into the back and there is a mezzanine floor and some allegedly private rooms. On the walls are some fairly dodgy pieces of art, including something that looks disconcertingly like Salvador Dali's attempt to create an album cover for Led Zeppelin circa 1973.

As we picked our way through the throng in the bar, our path was momentarily blocked by a youngish man in a suit (a rare sight in the West End these days), who appeared to be engaged in the complex task of vomiting into a beer bottle. I was tempted to hang around and see whether he managed this feat, but my wife tugged me onwards into the cacophony of the main room. As it was just the two of us, the trick was to pick a table as far away as possible from the year-end merriment unfolding around us.

At first it seemed that Brown's had come a long way from its Oxbridge days - the notionally Italian-themed menu, albeit in mock-Hoxton surroundings, kicks off well enough with a selection of smoked and cured meats. Under the heading 'salumeria della casa' were speck, bresaola, Parma ham and ventricina, which five or ten years ago would have been regarded as exotic on the menu of even a moderately advanced Italian restaurant, let alone a turbo-trattoria on Haymarket.

Starters include bruschetta, grilled smoked ricotta from Sardinia, Castelluccio lentil soup and other vaguely Italian-sounding things. But concessions are already being made to traditional West End tastes with the appearance of Caesar salad (notionally Italian, I suppose, given the Roman emperor thing). And by the time you get to main courses, such classic Italian dishes as grilled Scottish salmon (salmone grigliato) and the Quod cheeseburger begin to surface.

I started with a crab salad: one scoop of brown meat, one of white, some leaves and lots of lemony tang - not bad. The missus toyed with some balsamic chargrilled veg (adequate) before moving onto il rib-eye steak. I had il fresh grilled tuna steak. The tuna steak looked good, it just didn't taste of an awful lot, ditto the rib-eye.

Service is commendable, swift, pleasant and, given the demands of darting between tables of inebriates, heroically personable. The resturant is also cheapish - dinner for two comes in at just under £50.