I have to accept, sometimes, that my job as a restaurant critic makes me ill-suited to being a critic of restaurants. To illustrate this apparently oxymoronic (not to say moronic) point, I’ll tell you how I went to a little neighbourhood restaurant with some friends, didn’t really rate it at all, and then had it explained to me, by those friends, why the place was really rather good.

It’s a newly opened Italian restaurant called La Collina, which is owned by the same people as the rather hit-and-miss Italian restaurant that previously occupied the site, called La Superba, and the rather hit-and-miss Italian place which occupied the site before that, Vegia Zena.

It’s in Primrose Hill, a goppingly wealthy area these days, which has been historically rather unlucky with restaurants, except in the case of Sardo Canale, which is one of the best Italians in London, and by comparison with which La Collina was always likely to struggle.

We booked late and, as always seemed to happen at La Superba and Vegia Zenia, the convivial upstairs was rammed to the rafters, a couple of tables too small for three were available in the more rackety downstairs, so we ended up in the garden, protected from the late summer drizzle by a big white parasol.

In its previous incarnations the food has been principally Genovese (meaning the usual suspects, plus pesto), and though the new chef is from Piedmont, the pesto is still there. I had it, it was the same as ever: better than bottled, but not as good as my own home-made (or any home-made I’ve ever had). The actual pasta (tagliolini all’uovo, the menu said) reminded me uncannily of Chinese packet noodles – I’m not saying it was Chinese packet noodles – but the strands had that spooky brittleness.

But I’m shooting ahead. Starters were a mixed bag. Best of the bunch was a carpaccio di polpo con rucola e noci, which proved to be wafer-thin slivers from a pressed bloc of octopus tentacles that looked breath­takingly beautiful (rows of round tentacular cross-sections of dazzling white and purple) and tasted faintly of octopus – which is fair enough, for octopus has only a faint taste. The venison carpaccio was also fine – a preponderance of cold starters should not put you off, by the way, because plenty of dishes that need only plating should mean, in a busy local restaurant, that they have more time to get the mains right.

Alas, it doesn’t totally eradicate the possibility of disaster, and the third starter, a salad of crab and avocado, tasted, alas, of soap. Although it is true, as one of my friends pointed out, that, “It’s very easy to get the taste of soap into things, particularly in a small kitchen. And it means it’s probably very clean in there.”

Also not good were the gnocchetti neri con scampi e cozze. The black dumplings were all right, but the whole thing was honkingly over-fishy (I did not enjoy my one foray into the proximity of the plate), and the langoustines were so overcooked as to collapse like wet bog-roll when you tried to split the shell, which, overboiled, was no longer brittle.

Quaglie al forno con luganega were farmed little birds tasting of not very much, stuffed with herby sausage. Not bad, but really just a sausage with a bird-shaped skin. Duck breast with braised endive was served very rare and enjoyed by my pals, but I’ve yet to meet a human who cries aloud when they see it on a menu: “Oh, yummy! Braised endive!”

All this fairly ordinary food arrived very slowly, which shouldn’t happen when one is having only cold starters. Also, I felt that the waiter, though twinkly, was a bit impatient for the line of work he has chosen – repeatedly scampering inside the moment any of us paused to consider an order and not returning for some minutes. It is possible that the rain had something to do with this (there was no room for all four of us under the dampening parasol), but it felt rather odd when we finally had to say to him, very clearly: “Please stay right there, and don’t move until we have ordered our supper.”

When, many hours later, we finally staggered out into the night, righteously shrinered on all the cheap chianti we had had to drink to fill the interminable spaces of waiting, I declared my intention, when I sobered up next morning, to nail the place to the wall. Which is when I had it explained to me that, as a restaurant critic, I am poorly placed to criticise restaurants.

“The thing about people round here, Giles,” said my mate (who has lived all his life in Primrose Hill), “is that they don’t really believe in eating out. What you don’t appreciate, in your position, is how expensive it is. Sardo is fantastic, of course, but round here people just think it is madly pricey and grumble about the size of the portions. When they go to a local restaurant people want to eat and drink a lot. And if you do that at Sardo, it’s going to cost you a hundred quid a head, maybe more. And most people round here still can’t afford to pay that. Or believe that to do so is terribly vulgar.

“Round here, people are used to Lemonia, where you can stuff yourself silly and get pissed for thirty quid. They want food that is adequate – and sometimes not even that, which is why Trojka on Regent’s Park Road is still in business – and wine that does the trick, for an amount they won’t notice going out of their account.

“That’s why the gastropub thing was so quick to happen here in the Nineties – and you have to remember that the Lansdowne and the Engineer used to be quite good and reasonably cheap – because these are still fairly rich, fairly old, mostly native English people, not the rich young foreign wankers who keep the places you write about going. La Collina is a good, cheap, local restaurant with friendly service, you should tell your readers that.”

Chastened (and not a little wearied) by this diatribe, I decided to try out these new parameters for measuring local Italians a couple of days later, on a place called Via Condotti, open a few weeks and pushing itself as a neighbourhood restaurant that just happens to be on Conduit Street, between the two little neighbourhood streets of Regent and Bond.

Opposite a little local rag shop called Vivienne Westwood, on the site of what used to be Deca, owned by the daughter of little local restaurateur Nico Ladenis, this little local Italian – whose chef previously worked for a little local chef called Giorgio Locatelli – is a paragon of great value local eating, with a three-course supper for £24.50 costing only £2 more than at La Collina.

Starters of grass pea soup with gnocchi and a poshed-up parmigiana di melanzane, presented with aubergine, tomato and mozzarella slices stacked up in the millefeuille manner, were excellent for the price, as were two red mullet fillets with capers, lemon and olives – as long as you don’t think sliced olives on a dish overpower the main man. Coniglio alla caccionata was two slices of rabbit saddle rolled around a paste of the animal’s offal, with the leg served wrapped in pancetta. The flesh itself didn’t taste of much – farmed rabbit rarely does, which is why chefs wrap it and stuff it – but it looked pretty, and there was plenty of it.

The millefoglie we had for pudding was also generous – lots of lemony custard and big berries between chunky slices of pastry – which allowed us to share one and save our hard-earned local pennies for a 57-quid bottle of Amarone (although there was a wine for only £17 on which a local could get properly schindlered for a one-note transaction).

Staying with value for money, they do say a smile costs nothing and our waiter was that rare combination of a tall, handsome, very capable Italian who also smiles a lot – and I don’t mean that in a gay way. Just in a friendly, local way.

From what I learnt after my meal at La Collina, I would say that Via Condotti is an exemplary local restaurant which should be extremely popular with people who live around here. Alas, nobody does.

La collina
17 Princess Road, NW1 (020-7483 0192)
Meat/fish: 5
Cooking: 5
Local value: 9
Score: 6.33

Via Condotti
23 Conduit Street, W1 (020-7493 7050)
Meat/fish: 5
Cooking: 6
Service: 9
Score: 6.67
Prices: as above.

E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know an ordinary local restaurant which you think is better than it really is because it’s so convenient

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