Café Gourmand

Café Gourmand is a charming little place. It's what you want a Soho café to be like: retro-styled frontage, marble and glass display cabinet, one shared table and some bar stools perched around high counters. Our waiter even spoke with a 'Rapido' French accent, like Antoine de Caunes. It's all suitably nouveau-rustic, with a blackboard menu of simple breakfast and lunch dishes and snacks.

There are currently a few (bought-in) croissants and breads, soup of the day, filled sandwiches, tartines (open sandwiches), a small choice of hot dishes, some cakes. Roast beef takes pride of place in the window; our beef sandwich was nicely medium rare, with a smear of horseradish to give it a kick.

The hot dishes on two return visits were less successful. A day's special of cassoulet mostly contained good pork sausages and soft haricot beans, but the sauce was too salty. Coq au vin had been correctly slow-cooked so the meat slid off the bone, but the sauce was a little watery.

The French apple tart was topped with wafer-thin apple slices which were unglazed and wilting a bit, the pastry base verging on burnt. Much better were the three little desserts - crème brûlée, lemon tart and chocolate mousse.

Café Gourmand has a lovely personality, but on two of our three visits during the first month, the food was a bit disappointing. Fortunately, things look likely to improve soon. Evening opening is planned (until 10pm Mon-Sat), which should up the ante a bit, and turn it into more of a bistro than a café.