The world on your plate

As the urban myth goes, Fluffy is the favoured chicken substitute for unscrupulous fried chicken outlets and I wouldn't be surprised if I have eaten and enjoyed lost kitties at some point over the years. You can Kentucky/ Tennessee/Southern fry anything - it's always the same kind of delicious.

The risk of ingesting feline fast food was particularly high in West Ken. Until recently, the residents there had little in the way of eating out options, bar chicken-frying representative from every southern state of America and kebabs. When a new Italian, Intermezzo, opened in her neighbourhood, a West Kensington Ms insisted, 'You must review it. I love it, love it, love it.'

It's a small place - pot plants, reconstituted marble floors, wooden bar - could be tapas, could be independent coffee bar. The pine tables were as blonde as Ulrika. A blackboard with a list of popular cocktails and coffees epitomised the efforts the owners were making to be all things to all residents. The menu has pizza, pasta and some Mediterranean dishes. Emray, the Afghan-Pakistani film-maker, and I both started with the salad folpi, which was some cool and tasteless squid, stir-fried but distinctively free of fat, barely dressed in a light, garlic and tomato (make that flavourless) dressing, sitting on some undressed radicchio. It was no-comment food.

We followed this with: Emray - lamb meatballs in red wine sauce, and me - sea bass. The meatballs were under seasoned and huge. The sea bass came whole, in its skin, which was nicely salted, with a sprinkling of toasted almonds. And that was that. The vegetables were criminally cold - I sent Emray's back.

There was something peculiar about the food. It was extraordinarily plain. It didn't feel Mediterranean, in any shape I knew it. Food this nude isn't sexy at all. I asked the lovely waitress from Minsk where the chef was from. (Belarussian waitress, Italian restaurant - should have rung warning bells.) The chef, she said, was Serbian. He said he was a mechanical engineer by trade, but Milosevic had forced him to leave his homeland and come to London, where he worked his way up from washing dishes to being a chef.

He uses all the English books, he said, name checking Jamie Oliver, and then, 'I give it the character of Yugoslavian food.' By this he meant, 'Skip the sauce and leave the main ingredients with their natural smell and taste.' In this knowledge, I retrospectively enjoyed my meal more. A banoffee pie we split at the end helped, with its buttery layer of banana parfait on top of the biscuit - it was pretty loveable. I can understand why they might not call it 'Jamie Oliver in a Serbian style, served at room temperature', but this is the most authentic way to describe the place.

If Intermezzo was next to, say, Gordon Ramsay's place, even the not that-good one at the Connaught, it would look very bad indeed. But sitting here in West Ken, Intermezzo's some kinda good enough.

Intermezzo
8 Charleville Road, W14 9JL