Suited and booted

What foodie hasn't had fantasies of a comfortable ride, a guidebook and a cruise through France, Spain or Italy with a fellow piglet at your side. The thought alone makes me drool on to my elasticated waistband. Restaurant guides are essential when you are out of town or overseas - unless you have well-fed, well-travelled friends to pass on recommendations.

Things are different in your hometown, though - the guides can't give you all the explicit details you need. It's our friends who give us the skinny on where to eat. Often when deciding where to go with my dinner dates (meaning any old folk, not just blokes that want you with liqueurs), I will throw suggestions back and forth, discarding them like bad outfits. If you wind up in the wrong joint, it's like a bad hair day --you feel uncomfortable and irritated. You want more than just essential information, you need a personal endorsement.

It was my brother who got me down to Lanes. Friends of friends opened the place at the end of last year, and they were good blokes. Owners James Robertson (who used to shoot and drink with Marco) and Hamish Smith, and chef Hayden Smith (no relation), have all done plenty of Marco time in their careers.

Lanes is in the City. Restaurants in the low Es always remind me of a period in my life when I seemed to jump from one banker to another and was always the most inappropriately dressed woman in the room, what with not owning any power suits or neat court shoes. When I first looked into Lanes, I was alone for lunch. The crowd seemed to conform to the City norm - blokes, 40 to 60-ish, and a few smart ladies. The bar, however, was propped up by some very unsuity music-biz types, cracking their way through beers and vodkas. The room has a gentlemen's-club-meets-chophouse-meets-Davy's-wine-bar feel - bare boards, burgundy banquettes, lots of napery and dark wood. I stood feeling a bit silly for a while before one of the aforementioned nice chaps greeted me and put me in a comfortable corner for lone dining.

The menu has Italian/French accents, wrapped around very British-style ingredients - lots of root veg and meat. I loved the salad of smoked eel and lentil gateau. It came in a stack with complementary delights on every level. The eel had strong, pleasantly kipperish qualities, as well as that savoury-meets-honeyed taste you find in Japanese eel dishes grilled with sweet soy sauce. Underneath that was some crispy potato cake, and underneath that a stocky little disc of soft lentils in a chicken-stock jelly, which I loved.

It was an understated starter, beautifully executed. Its only annoying quality was the generous application of frondy leaves. Grrr, the irritation of looking like a cow as you try to get this unruly, bad salad hair into your gob.

I sat and twiddled my thumbs and examined the napery, as you do between courses when eating alone. It looked a teensy, weensy bit grubby, but I doubt I would have noticed this if I had been with friends.

Roast guinea fowl, morel tagliatelli, truffle jus and that king among vegetables, purple sprouting broccoli, was also a complete and happy dish, the meat a flavoursome mix of brown and white, wrapped around a light eggy stuffing of something mildy chickeny and mushroomy.

The execution of the food was at the level of the some of the dandier gastropubs. You could tell the chef had class, but he had beaten his talent around the head with the stick of cool informality. Well done him.

I wonder if this is why, in the evening a few days later when I stuck my nose in the door, I could hear a laid-back, if ubiquitous, Ibiza compilation, and the restaurant felt considerably younger, more relaxed, and more like people were spending their own money. Lanes looks to have a good future, both as a relaxed City dining room and, after dark, as a genuinely OK place to hang out - even if you don't own a power suit and a pair of neat court shoes.

Marco Pierre White Steakhouse & Grill
Middlesex Street, London, E1 7JF