Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Soho and Covent Garden may be awash with good or half-decent places to eat and drink, but the closer you get to Tottenham Court Road tube and Centrepoint, the more likely you are to encounter fried-chicken joints, late-night kebab shops and drunks-infested bars. By the time you reach the Centrepoint underpass, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s the portal to hell.

The last place to get a bite or drink is the scary-looking Denmark Place, a narrow ‘Tin Pan Alley’ with recording studios, tattoo parlours and dingy bars selling strong lager. Of a warm evening, the bare-fleshed denizens can make you feel as if you’ve taken a very wrong turn on the way to Sunday school.

Next street over is the relative safety of traffic-choked Denmark Street. It’s home to London’s biggest collection of guitar shops, plus an illuminated sign saying ‘Indian Food’, which some wag has amended to ‘Cowboy Food’. This is where you’ll find the Giaconda Dining Room, which, with its black frontage, at first appears fittingly goth. But through the French windows and slatted blinds you might spot the wine rack that covers the rear wall, which already makes a statement about the ambition of this tiny, but smartly dressed dining room. Then Tracey appears, in a vintage-style waitress uniform, and in a ‘Kath & Kim’ accent says, ‘Can oi help yooo?’

Tracey’s husband is the chef Paul Merrony, and the two of them run this little show. Paul produces brilliant dishes that belie such a modest setting (I’ve seen bigger beach huts). Paul used to be one of Sydney’s most fêted chefs, but they moved to London around a year ago and Paul took off his chef’s apron for a while. Without big-budget backers or the money for a big venue, the minuscule Giaconda Dining Room is as much West End space as they could afford.

It must be quite a feat to produce a fairly extensive menu of such quality from a galley kitchen. But we saw no corners cut in a dish of ‘crab omelette, green salad’, the terse description for a beautifully presented bowl of lobster bisque, with a yellow island of omelette topped by the dark-tipped pincers of the shelled crab claws. The omelette was a thin layer encasing the brown and white crabmeat within.

The short descriptions often undersell the imaginative, attractive dishes. One of the more challenging dishes was described as ‘Boneless (almost!) & crisped pigs trotters; eggs mayonnaise’. As predicted, there were a few small bones, but the texture wasn’t really ‘crisped’; it was more ‘ squidged’, and oddly bland. But every other dish was a hit, such as the pairing of marinated salmon with shards of fennel in another starter-sized dish.

There are five desserts on offer, including the improbable French toast with caramelised pears and vanilla custard, a further nod to an Aussie hand in the kitchen.

Giaconda’s name comes from the Caffè La Giaconda (‘Mona Lisa Café’) that used to be on the site in the 1960s. The all-new Giaconda is a very satisfying place to eat, on many levels. The cooking can be excellent, yet there’s no showiness or pretension; Tracey is both no-nonsense and friendly, the atmosphere relaxed and surprisingly neighbourly for W1. The black tables and simple cutlery focus attention on the food, which is as it should be. And the mid-range pricing makes it great value.

There are several good wines by the glass at fair prices, but also well-chosen bottles from the modestly priced up to more celebratory choices. All of the wines are supplied by Les Caves de Pyrène, which is one of the leading wine suppliers in the UK, and – very unusually – the same mark up is applied to all the bottles. That means the more expensive bottles are better value, and a real bargain if you compare what the same wines cost in other West End restaurants. Reason enough to put a wry Mona Lisa smile on anyone’s face, I reckon.

Time Out Issue 1983: August 21-27 2008