Restaurant spy: E&O

Just over a year ago, I first set foot in e&o in Notting Hill as the guest of a friend who'd been invited to a 'soft opening'. As a West Londoner, I was a little dubious about it beforehand because of its East London associations. The owner, Will Ricker, also owns The Great Eastern Dining Room, a favourite with the Damien Hirst crowd, and this was his first foray out of Shoreditch.

Admittedly, I live in Shepherd's Bush rather than Notting Hill, but such distinctions fade into the background when faced with an invasion of Young British Artists.

What illusions I'd had about looking down my nose at the clientele were soon dashed. It was packed to the rafters with well-heeled Notting Hillbillies. Even Tchaik Chassay, the Bob Marley of the trustafarians, was there. Indeed, the 'soft opening' in question was so oversubscribed that the manager had given away my friend's table. Almost instantly, e&o had become the trendiest restaurant in West London.

A year later, e&o is still going strong. It's been described as 'The Ivy of West London', but a better name for it might be 'Nobu Junior'.

Alternatively known as pan-Asian or South-East Asian, the cuisine is a mix of Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Thai - a combination that's as popular with Arab playboys as it is with anorexic models.

The name E&O is supposed to stand for Eastern & Oriental but it could just as easily stand for eligible & ostentatious. The typical customer has one foot in All Saints Road and the other in St Tropez. When I went there last week an Aston Martin was parked outside.

The fact that e&o has become such a 'scene restaurant' has aroused mixed feelings in the locals. Take my dining companion, dotcom entrepreneur and longterm Notting Hill resident James Mendelson. I asked him what kind of experience he'd had the last time he'd been there and he said it had been good and bad. The good news was he was sitting a few feet away from Nicole Kidman; the bad news was his waiter was so overexcited by the presence of an A-list movie star he completely forgot to process James's order. It was an hour before the food arrived and he said that if the manager hadn't insisted on paying for it - the least he could do in the circumstances - he never would have come back.

James estimated that about 50 per cent of the restaurant's clientele on the night we went were 'bridge and tunnel'. He reckoned that the trustafarian elite had all retreated round the corner to The Electric House, the newly opened club above The Electric Brasserie - the West London branch of Soho House. This establishment has the advantage of being members only.

I think James was probably being a little hard on e&o. The manager, Marco Fazzina, claimed that threequarters of the customers were locals and that struck me as about right. When restaurants are as hot as e&o, it's tempting to ignore the needs of your regular customers and pack in as many people as possible, but this spells doom in the long run. Ricker knows that the long-term health of any restaurant depends on its local clientele. e&o probably won't be the most fashionable restaurant in West London for much longer - that title may have already been stolen by The Electric House - but I think it's here to stay.