Jan Moir Are You Ready To Order

A menu should be an exciting document; as thrilling as a tax rebate and billowing with promise, like the most succulent of love letters. Diners should be able to pick up a menu, read it, and then tremble with anticipation at the delights to come. You don’t need me to tell you that this rarely happens. More often than not, menus in this country are about as appetising as a decree nisi, or as daunting as a writ. They are a fiction of delusion and hubris, an inventory of cheap farmed sea bass, haggis risotto, double shifts and broken dreams. Sometimes they can make the strong diner weep, or reel out into the night with the words handcrafted salad or textures of parsley swimming before his or her oscillating eyes. However, it’s not like that at Le Café Anglais. Oh dear, no. It’s not like that at all. Here, the menu sings with possibility and dash, and is seasoned with an innate understanding of what it is that people want to eat and what they like to drink. From the giddy list of aperitifs - a fresh cherry tomato Virgin Mary, Campari and soda, Gin Fizz - right through the hors d’oeuvres section, the first courses, the fish, the roasts, the vegetables, the desserts and the cheese, it is a marvel of precision engineered gourmandising. ‘It’s a bit too long,’ says a woman at the next table, which just goes to show that given a chance, some people will complain about anything. Even being given a choice.

Le Café Anglais and its bountiful menu is the work of chef Rowley Leigh, chiefly known for his work at Kensington Place over the last two decades. This new restaurant, of which he is a part owner, along with restaurateur Charlie McVeigh, is situated in a former McDonald’s site of Whiteley’s shopping centre. I know! Cue mass of shrieking Londoners stampeding for the exits as they suddenly remember previous appointments on the other side of town. Whiteley’s has never been very fashionable nor much loved, but that is all about to change. Here on the second floor, Café Anglais has carved out its own lovely space and cool identity. With its own entrance in Porchester Gardens, you can float straight up in the lift to the 7,000 sq ft, 170-seat enterprise, where a huge wall of curving window bathes the pale green banquettes and crisp white tablecloths in a wintry, English light. The view stretches across the rooftops and ragtag chimney pots towards Hyde Park, while dusty, city trees thrive and shimmer on the streets outside.

This is a big room with a big heart. It is Leigh’s belief that restaurants should be democratic, egalitarian places and Café Anglais is capacious enough to absorb all comers. Already, shopping mums, famous actors, English cricketers, hungry families, household names and practically every chef in town has come to marvel at the restaurant some are calling the new Wolseley. How very dare they, for Café Anglais is so, so much better than that. On a huge, vertical rotisserie in the open kitchen, chefs tend golden chickens, crisping game birds, joints of beef and lobsters. (There are plans to have a special roast every evening, such as roast goose with apple sauce, and there will be also be a set lunch every day at £19 or so). At the moment, diners can choose between a simple, small meal or a multi-course blow out. I don’t think I have to tell you which S prefers.

Everything here is made with care and innate culinary intelligence. From the hors d’oeuvres, a pot of rabbit rillettes is served with the bracing, bitter pucker of pickled endive. Oeuf en gelee features a soft yolked egg in a coffin of mahogany jelly. A wobble of savoury parmesan custard comes in a cup alongside tiny, toasted anchovy sandwiches; nursery food at its most seductive. First courses include a good and gutsy warm smoked eel salad with bacon; trays of oysters; and a bouncy, delicious pike boudin lightly flecked with herbs and served with a blameless pool of buerre blanc. Pike boudin? Who else but Leigh would put that on a menu?

It is hard to resist the lure of the rotisserie when it comes to the main courses. Even the bird for the pheasant choucroute S and I share one evening is given a twirl on the spit before being buried in cabbage alongside slabs of pork belly and frankfurters. With a bottle of Riesling Grand Cru Altenberg de Bergbieten 2004 Mochel (£39) it is a most agreeable winter supper. The 100 bin wine list, which starts at £17.50 for a bottle of Italian red, is a well balanced trot through the useful, the great and the good value. Also, 24 wines, including a Meursault 2004 Caillot, are sold by glass, 250ml carafe or bottle.

The roast chickens are excellent – and can be ordered whole (£35), half (£17.50), breast (£15.50) or leg (£5.00). Elsewhere, teal can be ordered by the brace, grey partridge with bread sauce, gravy and game chips or ribs of beef to share. Fish are grilled or poached, and served plain or with sauce béarnaise or sauce vierge. The latter also turns up dribbled across a vegetable selection of roast beets, squash, onions, radicchio di Treviso and a little cake of polenta. The thoughtfulness of that little assembly just kills me.

Rowley Leigh has been a presence in London kitchens for many years, most notably at Kensington Place in Notting Hill. This was one of the pioneering restaurants that helped democratise capital dining, and drag eating out in this country into the 21st century. There was good wine that didn’t cost a fortune, nice olives and good bread. At a time when these things were far from commonplace, Kensington Place and Rowley Leigh provided them in an atmosphere that was always alive with the crackle and promise of a good lunch or a fine dinner in the air. Le Café Anglais, named after the 19th century Parisian restaurant founded in honour of the peace treaty between England and France, looks set to eclipse that. Here, Leigh is finally, totally in charge of the whole show and his expertise is evident in every nook and cranny of the operation. He’s an old pro, one who can cook better French food than most French restaurants, superior fish dishes to most seafood restaurants and has the wit to turn out scrumptious sherry trifles and a jammy queen of puddings alongside bitter chocolate soufflés and a crisp quince and pear tart.

In short, this is, without doubt, the best and most exciting restaurant to open in London for a very long time. It marries affordable glamour with soulful élan, charming service and the kind of food everyone wants to eat. Across town there are many talented kitchens pushing the boundaries of haute cuisine and doing interesting things with foam. There is a place for those eager young chefs, with their enoki necks and bad skin, being hothoused in basement kitchens like a crop of wan mushrooms. Yet in the final reckoning, the person who you really want to cook for you is someone who’s lived a little and read a book. Someone who has been buffeted by the storms of life, and who understands the incalculable benefits of a good, hot meal on a ruptured soul. And at last, we have the right man in charge of the right kitchen in a restaurant that we all deserve.

• Le Café Anglais, 8 Porchester Gardens, London W2 4DB. Tel: 020 7221 1415. Lunch or dinner for two, excluding drinks and service, £65.