Slice has the upper crust

I'm a sucker for presentation. For a recent lunch at the Connaught's new Menu restaurant, I had a white onion velouté with tiddly frogs legs that had been coated in breadcrumbs and looked like dolls' house drumsticks. These froggy drummers were a tasty enough microbite, but it was the way they looked that gave me a kick.

But much as I dig fancy food, sometimes you just want simple food, done well and at a cheap price. If I lived in Provence or Bologna, no worries, but here in London cheap is usually merely adequate (excluding the more exotic ethnic places) and everywhere else seems to have frogs' legs pretensions, which is fine at the Connaught, but irritating in your local Eurohodgepodge dining room.

There are no such stresses at Slice, the baby on Clapham's gastro block, Northcote Road. This bright and tunnel-like cafe is championing Italian street food. The smells at Slice are primero olfactory foreplay. You walk off the street into a heady mix of toasty, cheesy, bready smells wafting from an Italian brick oven in the middle of the room. Steaming trays of 2ft-long pizza al taglio are swept out on to a marble slab under your already ecstatic nose. You go over, point at what you fancy, and a hefty rectangle is cut off for you, at £3.50 a slice, or £10 for four. We snaffled a quick slice as an entrée.

My cheffy chum Kev is a bugger of a stickler on Italian food. As we cut into the pizza's thick dough, there was a woof of air and a crunch as we hit the bottom - the brick oven doing its job proper. Kev was impressed, quite a feat.

If you know deep-pan pizza as a doormat of stodgy gunge, I exhort you to come here and think again. The sauce was made with fresh tomatoes, the peppers were roasted to a soft sweetness, the olives and pepperoni were nothing special, but the overall effect produced such yumming and oohing that the people behind us said, 'We'll have what they're having.'

The menu is short and cheap - pizza, two pasta dishes, side salads and focaccia di recco - which we chose. This is thin, light pastry filled with salty, fresh stracchino cheese and topped with your choice of good things like smoked salmon, San Daniele Parma ham or roast aubergine. These arrived looking like lightly scorched pillows and were huge. I'd had a bitch day, my life and London traffic was constipated and useless. Eating my focaccia piled with rocket and parmesan made me happy. Instant upper. Kev announced his focaccia with ham and rocket was as good as that at Wolfgang Puck's old Spago in Beverly Hills. Blimey.

A cheap glass of colori primitivo di Sicilia (less than 100 per cent mark up - the average in town is 250-300 per cent) burst with deep berry flavour. Marine Ices, who make the best ice cream in London, supply the gelati, the mozzarella and other cheeses are flown in weekly from Italy. Some of the ingredients lacked sparkle, the romaine in a mixed salad had an unforgivable brown edge, and the olives were flat in flavour. However, at this price, who gives a toss? We took our leftovers home in brown boxes and they were as good cold for breakfast as they were fresh out of the oven.

Slice
60 Northcote Road, SW11 1PA