Slick saviour to savour

There is so much that is jawdroppingly admirable about Acorn House that it threw me into a lather. It's been suggested that Acorn House is the most eco-friendly restaurant in Britain. And I believe it. Listen to this: all produce - meat, fish, vegetables, the lot - is sustainable and sourced from local suppliers. The water they serve is tap, purified on site. Furniture is made from either recycled or sustainable materials. All kitchen waste is composted to be re-used on their own garden; they've got a wormery to help them with the job. Staff are gently encouraged to get to work using either bikes or their own two feet - the restaurant's van runs on bio-diesel. Distant ingredients are not air-freighted but travel in a leisurely fashion by boat. Hell, even their Christmas decorations are being replanted.

But this isn't just the brainchild of some savvy young marketing men jumping on to a green bandwagon. It's an alliance between the Shoreditch Trust and the Terrence Higgins Trust designed to operate as a training ground for the local community, aiming to send ten young people out into the world each year, fully versed in the eco-restaurant trade. They have other initiatives up their sleeves, too, such as breakfast clubs and lunchbox schemes for local children.

Yes, if you sense shades of a certain Mr Oliver, both chef Arthur Potts Dawson and manager Jamie Grainger-Smith (aka the Bliss Restaurant Consultancy) worked with Saint Jamie at Fifteen. But only the mean-spirited could bring themselves to carp about copycatting. And even if we get the impression that these two key characters are not in it for the duration, Grainger-Smith's palpable commitment to every aspect of the project - he took us through the ethos with the brimming enthusiasm of an 11-year-old with a new Nintendo Wii - indicate that they'll be leaving behind a slick, smooth-running operation with its heart firmly in the right place.

But my anxiety didn't come from guilt at not being able to live up to the high-mindedness of the whole set-up (though that too). It was more from a basic, weaselly kind of panic: what if I didn't like the place? How on Earth could I bring myself to give it a slating? It would be like criticising David Attenborough for wearing last season's fashions.

Or would it? This is, despite the commendable ideals, a restaurant. It serves food and that food should be good. But still: liberal angst got to me; if under these circumstances what I got was only edible, I was happy to defy my natural tendencies and practise extreme leniency.

So I am beyond thrilled to report that the food wasn't just edible, it was mostly terrific - better than in many a restaurant that doesn't hobble itself with eco-restrictions. The regularly changing, seasonal menu - well, of course - is bursting with ingredients such as chestnuts, pumpkin, Stilton, pearl barley, celeriac and wild mushrooms. You just know that when you come back in summer, it'll be dancing with bright berries and vivid asparagus and ripe, sweet tomatoes.

There is, as you'd expect, a homespun air to it. Ravioli stuffed with cavolo nero (that marvellously composty black Italian cabbage) didn't feature the gossamer pasta so currently modish, but thick, toothsome stuff, bathed in some nutty burnt butter. And we get mutton, not lamb, a melting pile of ripely flavoursome meat with a dod of quince to cut the sheepy richness and some pink fir apple potatoes of such firm, earthy, potatoey gorgeousness that I never want to eat another plebeian King Edward. A 'winter salad' brandished impeccable credentials: superfoods, game and foraged food - pomegranate, pheasant and dandelion leaves - that could act as a blueprint for the current foodie zeitgeist.

Anyway, here - purely in the interest of fairness - is the mean-spiritedness. There are things that don't quite work. I didn't warm to a pyramid of flourless peppered chocolate cake with a curious moisturelacking dustiness (but its ginger ice cream was beautiful). The idea of cracked toffee chestnuts with poached pears was a fabulous one; sadly, the chestnuts were tough as old boots, like ossified fairground toffee apples ( firstclass poached pear, however). OK, so I can't quite bring myself to do the dirty - it just feels really petty.

Look, I'm not being reductive, but any of you who felt the grim chill of the Stern report (and shouldn't that be all of us?) or sat cowering through Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth could do a lot worse than embrace Acorn House to your endangered bosoms. Because if businesses like this don't presage the future, then we're not likely to have much of one. Oh, and you eat pretty well, too.

A meal for two with wine, water and service costs about £90. Tel: 020 7812 1842. www.acornhouserestaurant.com Tube: King's Cross

Acorn House
Swinton Street, London, WC1X 9NT