Saucy Sarracino

In recent years, every time I have had a spot of sadness I have ended up reviewing Italian restaurants immediately afterwards. This has proved a useful study in the effects of emotion on taste buds.

The first was Florians in Crouch End. A friend who loved the place claimed I was in no fit state to give it a fair critique, and my unenthusiastic review was dismissed by him as being unsound on the grounds of my upset.

My Florians-loving friend was right, I assumed. Then the next little drama trundled by and, duly, I reviewed Battersea's Donna Margherita. Despite the selfpity and regret in my belly, the food did not turn to ashes in my mouth. The roaring Neapolitan talent in the kitchen was more potent than my sorrow. An upshot of this meal was my now high regard for Neapolitan food. It's poor-folks food, based around simple vegetable ingredients - cheap cuts of meat, wheat, flour, oil and tomatoes. Naples gave us pizza, and has fabulous street food. Neapolitan food is uplifting - colourful flavours from good basic ingredients.

So after yet another broken rung on my spirit ladder, I was looking forward to reviewing Sarracino, a Neapolitan place recommended as 'a gem of a find' by a reader, who raved about the pizza.

I took my mate, the restaurateur.

I am trying to convince him that Italian food is as riveting as French, so we avoided the pizzas and sampled the Neapolitan cuisine instead. But Sarracino was not going to prove a great help to my argument. The decor and light was oddly flat - brown stone tiles on the floor and, up to hip height, huge expanses of unfettered cream walls and lots of bright, recessed downlighters. Someone should outlaw those straw-seated bistro chairs, I have never sat in a comfortable one. The tables were those cheap veneer type that never adequately represent the warmth in wood tones - they are to tables what cheap, mechanically-recoveredmeatand-rusk-stuffed chipolatas are to sausages.

The music was genuinely Neapolitan, but the restaurateur thought it was Indian. I am ashamed to say I asked them to change it.

None of this would have mattered much had the food been up to par. We were the only English people in a room about a quarter full with Italians. I am starting to believe that indigenous folk eating in ethnic restaurants is not necessarily the good sign we all like to think it is.

I had mediocre dim sum surrounded by Chinese people the other day.

We opened up with some home-made bread with olive oil - one countryish in style, another with lardons, both over-heavy but lovably starchy nonetheless. It's easy to excuse foibles in fresh baked bread.

The starters, while not tasting bad, had a sort of wrongness about them that prompted the restaurateur to say, 'It's as if the chef didn't come in and someone who knows nothing about food has followed the recipes, but that's about it.' I agreed. His starter of swordfish carpaccio was served very cold, and mussed up with salad leaves, an oily dressing, roasted peppers and, Lord help us, raw, sliced button mushrooms. Yuck! My mozzarella was too firm to be brilliant, and with it being made near Naples and this place being very big on its Neapolitan roots, I thought it might be more spongy, lusty and milky. It came with acidic, orange, probably Dutch (says it all) tomatoes and a sprig of basil. I asked for some olive oil, and was surprised to see that it was the supermarket standard Carapelli, which is made in Florence.

The restaurateur had the ragu. It is meant to be a slow-cooked, melting dish, with a sauce that infuses every part of the pasta. Instead, the meat had formed in sparse little spots around the pasta, which had a texture suggesting that it was not cooked in hot enough water. I had a pasta dish with monkfish and canellini beans. The pasta was clearly home-made, but the sauce was overcooked, the monkfish was chewy and the beans gritty. A tiramisu was made with cream instead of mascarpone, and a thick heavy layer of it. The broccoli we ordered never arrived, yet was on the bill. A sloppy oversight that is unforgivable in an almost empty restaurant.