Rather fond of Baraonda

This review was published on 20/4/01

It was, of course, Mourad Mazouz, the fashionable Berber better known as Momo, who invented Heddon Street. Before the glamorous North African set up his eponymous restaurant club here, Heddon Street was a forgotten backwater, chiefly known as the location of Huntsman's cutting rooms - indeed, what is now Sir Terence Conran's Zinc Bar & Grill, used to be the place where its one-button suits were cut.

Now this little alleyway is a bustling thoroughfare bristling with eating and drinking opportunities. Momo has added a tea room and antiques shop to his restaurant and bar, while just a few doors along is Zinc. At the bottom of the street there is something I can only describe as looking like a theme-pub take on the All Bar One concept.

The latest bit of hedonism on Heddon Street, Baraonda, is an Italian restaurant with a non-specific take on Mediterranean d?cor. Booking into the upstairs part of Baraonda is rather what I imagine eating inside a pizza oven might be like. The low, brick, vaulted ceiling is pleasantly oppressive - it might have been claustrophobic were it not for the plate-glass windows that give a great vantage point for comings and goings at Momo. The downstairs bar is odd in that I have yet to see it busy. I have come twice, and only on the second occasion did I see one man in there, writing postcards.

On my first visit, I was subjected to excruciating service from someone I can only describe as a European version of Benny from Crossroads. If you are missing the simpleton in the knitted headgear, sadly absent from the new Crossroads, visit Baraonda and, if you play your cards spectacularly badly, you might get 'Benny'. From the unconventional positioning of cutlery on the table to his ignorance of the dishes, his behaviour would have been quite unsettling had it not been so comical. But then a quixotic approach to waiting staff has always been a feature of life in Heddon Street. I suppose that this young man was no worse than many of the staff who used to work at Momo in its early days.

Besides, such an approach has character, and I like character. Whereas others might have opened a mega-chic, super-slick, multi-million-pound operation, the owners of Baraonda have seen fit to open what is in effect a turbo-charged pizza bar (think La Bersagliera on the King's Road). And for this I salute them; Baraonda is mercifully pretension free.

For my second visit I took as my dates a glamorous fashion-magazine journalist, a woman known to regular readers of this column as the Canadian, and, as our chaperone, the neglected, common-law spouse of a well-known property developer.

As is customary on such occasions (ie, lunch, dinner, in fact, any meeting), I was about 45 minutes late and the Canadian, sitting alone, had whipped herself up into a self-important, self-righteous and entirely justified frenzy. Luckily, she was taking her anger out on a pizza. The sight of her venting her considerable spleen on this harmless dish was alarming. I was just about to scarper, when she looked up.

I attempted to apologise: she complained about my tardiness, the weather, and was about to complain about the pizza that she was devouring with some vigour, when the common-law spouse walked in and presented a fresh target for a tirade. Thus I was free to tuck into a starter of red tuna in balsamic sauce with crispy vegetables and sesame. This is a dish that is little more than a tangled, tasty mound of raw, tender tuna, and having enjoyed it very much on my first visit, I decided to make its acquaintance again.

Having tried one of the more complex dishes on the earlier visit and not been overly impressed, I opted for pizza and was rewarded with a good, poppadom-thin base topped with cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and a centrally located egg.

I like to think I know a bit about pizzas. I've eaten them everywhere, from Rome to Santo Domingo, and was once ridiculed - not undeservedly - on national television by Evening Standard columnist Brian Sewell when I said that the best pizza I'dever had was at a small restaurant in the villageof Sospel, in the mountains behind Monte Carlo. Hesaid that this was the most pretentious thing he had ever heard. But I still hold by that comment, and regard myself as a reasonably experienced judge of a pizza; Baraonda's offering was pretty good.

Once the neglected, common-law spouse had apologised to the Canadian, she was allowed to get on with a dish of spaghetti and langoustines, which she said she enjoyed. Indeed, much of the pasta here is pretty good. I rather took to a dish of maltagliati pasta with a ragout of seabass, rocket and cherry tomatoes thatI ate on my first visit.