Slick Italian service

Imagine you were a restaurateur and that you had your eyes on a huge but dilapidated pub in SW17. What's more, your target pub overlooks Wandsworth Common and is surrounded by pricey houses full of affluent potential customers. Let us also note that it is just a short stroll from one of South London's most highly praised and consistently busy French restaurants - Chez Bruce.

Earlier this year, the group behind Christopher's in Covent Garden reopened the Surrey Tavern as Pomino, a middleweight Italian restaurant, and they deserve our congratulations for not banging out yet another stereotypical gastropub. There may be a bar at the front of this place, but the room feels like a genuine restaurant, the menu reads like a restaurant menu and the dishes are restaurant dishes. Which is just as well because there are already more than enough gastropubs in SW17.

Blue-and white tiles dominate one side of the room and en masse they may make you blink in shock. There is a stainless steel open kitchen and some high tables with stools. Otherwise it is all reassuringly normal. And so is the menu.

Starters include ribollita (the hearty Tuscan bean and veg soup), carpaccio of beef with rocket and pecorino, a salad of octopus with cannellini beans, tomato and basil.

The Antipasto Pomino offer is made up from very decent charcuterie, cut to order on a gleaming stainless steel slicer in the centre of the kitchen: prosciutto, salame, finocchiona, all silky fresh. There is also bruschetta with wild mushrooms and thyme, and a salad of rocket and bitter leaves with sweet raisins, pecorino and balsamic dressing.

The home-made pasta is very sound. Rigatoni comes with tomato, buffalo mozzarella and basil - good mozzarella and the pasta cooked suitably al dente. Also on offer are gnocchi with mussels, oven-dried tomatoes with basil and parsley and a sage risotto with chicken livers and Marsala.

The main courses touch all the comfort bases. There are grilled Tuscan fennel sausages with cannellini beans (good meaty sausages, good beans) - this plateful could pose as a pinup entitled 'hearty fare'.

Then there's roast leg of duck with olives and braised endive, roast red snapper with cherry tomatoes, celery and saffron sauce. Plus porchetta - billed as 'roast suckling pig, wild fennel seeds, roast potatoes and cavolella'.

Melting meat, but badly deficient in the crackling department. It is hard to reconcile even the most tender roast pork with the absence of crackling, particularly as there is a magnificent wood-fired oven blasting away here.

The wine list goes from plonk to super Tuscan fairly briskly, but on the foothills there are some obscure bottles at accessible prices - Ripa del Mandoria (£23.50) is worthy of note by anyone who likes their red wine dark, rich and soft.