15

VISITING PARENTS of Australian colleague, Sam, very kindly treated me to dinner at 'Sir' Jamie Oliver's Fifteen tonight, the outside of which looks like a '30s New York fire station. We dined at the Trattoria, a warm, well lit, ground floor space with exposed bar and kitchen tops, the latter including a trophy pasta maker. I was particularly charmed by the halibut which wasn't confused by a lemon mascarpone coating as it perched upon chard oars on a lentil sea. Vesuvio Fallanghina, softly speaking of a chemistry set of volcanic elements, smoothed, tingled and tousled alongside.

I was suprised by the small scale of the site and the relative value of the meal. Indeed, the fearesome critic Faye Maschler said: "You can eat very well and reasonably at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen. I have a feeling that not everybody knows that."