Roast has the perfect pitch

Can there be a better site for a restaurant in the whole of London? Roast is situated in the Floral Hall at Borough Market, the outdoor food emporium that's become a kind of Mecca for Britain's ever-growing population of epicures.

Sitting at one of the window tables, overlooking this bustling scene, you'd be forgiven for thinking that London is the most picturesque city in the world. This is the Big Smoke as depicted in the novels of Charles Dickens, the films of Walt Disney and the screenplays of Richard Curtis.

Roast, which opened in October last year, is the brainchild of Iqbal Wahhab, the restaurateur who launched the award-winning Cinnamon Club in 2001. Roast's main selling point, apart from its location, is that it serves authentically British cuisine, pitching its tent somewhere between St John and Smiths of Smithfield.

Iqbal, who was born in Bangladesh and moved to England when he was eight months old, is one of those firstgeneration immigrants who's more British than the British. 'It probably takes someone who is not 100 per cent British to say, "Come on, guys, be proud of your food,"' he says.

Roast is perched on the upper deck of the Floral Hall, a newly built replica of a building that was originally designed by Edward Middleton Barry in 1858, and which, until recently, was located next to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

The interior of the building, which has been redesigned by David Gabriel, is cavernous without being unfriendly, thanks to the huge glass windows on three of its four sides. The only black mark is a series of boxes stuck to one of the walls, an 'installation' by Ptolemy Mann that looks suspiciously like one of Donald Judd's famous minimalist sculptures.

So far, Roast has received very mixed reviews from my colleagues, partly, I suspect, because of its proximity to Borough Market. Launching a restaurant on such hallowed ground is a little like opening a trendy clothing boutique on Portobello Road: it's going to have to be pretty good to impress the loyalists.

The roast potatoes, in particular, have come in for repeated attacks, usually accompanied by the complaint that if Roast can't get something as basic as that right, it can hardly claim to be a proper British restaurant.

I started with Coronation chicken salad and followed up with honey roast ham and bubble and squeak, while my companion opted for pea and ham soup, followed by smoked haddock and spinach.

I found a large bit of bone in my starter that might have caused some serious damage if I'd bitten down on it, but my main course was very nice. My companion had better luck, claiming to like both his soup, which was made with
fresh peas, and his haddock, which had been bought fresh from the market that morning.