Matthew Norman.THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE.

Mathew Norman cannot resist joining in the alarming rapture for Locanda Locatelli.
Was there ever, in the history of British restaurants, such as instant smash as Locanda Locatelli? When it opened in March in a hotel off Oxford Street several newspapers had to carry apologies for the stains on the page where reviewers had drooled over their own words, while a call for a table elicited the reply that they'd be thrilled to accommodate is...in about ten weeks time.

It would be tweaking the truth to claim that this level of rapture doesn't bring out the very worst in those of us who prefer to let the hype settle down before finding out whether it was justified. It's like hearing that friends have just bought the most exquisite house. You are thrilled for them, of course. But the day your turn comes to go round and coo, somewhere in your soul a naughty little voice is squeaking, "Please, God, let it have rats and a major structural fault,"

This desire to find the imperfect in everything is, so celebrities like to inform us, that uniquely British trait known by Australians as "tall poppy syndrome" (build 'em up to knock 'em down) - and I can't claim that the chance to redress the balance with Locatelli would have been unwelcome. No one likes to run with the crowd.

Alas, alas and thrice alas, whatever crumbs of journalistic integrity remain oblige me to confess that the crowd was right, and that this is a very special Italian indeed.
The evening did start promisingly when a waiter exhibiting a certain "we are the talk of the town" cockiness refused a request for a copy of the menu to take home. "We donna give it to nobody" he said, his tone suggesting that any further inquiry would be met with, "You aska one more time, you gonna sleep witha da fishes." But from then on, fault was irksomely hard to find.

The decor, a cross between the sort of 1960's nightclub that played "The Girl from Ipanema" on a loop, with a 1970's Consulate advertisement in the back of Vogue in which people sat languidly around wearing Italian shoes, won't be to all tastes. But we thought that the hemispherical cream leather banquettes, curved mirrors and pleasantly dim lighting created the right sort of casual yet mildly sophisticated Eurotrash feel.

Anyway, who gives a damn? Food like this you'd be happy to eat on a silage mound. The menu (the one the donna give to nobody) is packed with novel and intriguing dishes, and no one was disappointed. There was some confusion when someone was given a broad bean and pecorino dish that she hadn't ordered, but this was replaced, quickly and apologetically, with a wonderfully fresh French bean salad with sun-dried tomato and smoky tuna (£8.50).

Both pasta starters were magnificent. My "home-made" taglionni (come now, Giorgio, no one thinks you buy Supersavers) with courgettes and dry tuna roe (£9) was imaginative and spectacular from the first salty taste of the roe to the luxuriant oily after taste. Raviolli with lemon cream and pork ragu (£9.50) was no less original or delicious.

Best of all was simplest of all - a spring salad (£7) of radish, baby carrot, fine beans, peas and endives, all in a dreamy light dressing, that had my wife in so alarming state of rapture that at one point I was close to summoning an ambulance.

"It's like eating fresh air," she enthused (do tramps, when they eat fresh air ever compare it to a spring salad?). "If I were a billionaire, I'd have this flown to me everyday, wherever I was in the world."

I was still musing on the absence of any "we" in this plutocratic fantasy when the main courses arrived. Loin of beef grilled with artichokes (£19.50) lacked the intensity of flavour evident elsewhere, but John Dory with potatoes and peas (£23) was superb, as was red mullet wrapped in capacollo ham and served with borlotti beans (£22). My roast rabbit with parma ham and polentta (£19.50) was incredibly good as well. If I had to split hairs, I might say it was infinitesimally over salted, but, doubtless, that's tall poppy syndrome kicking in once again.
The portions were so healthy that we picked at only one pud - a predictably delectable combination of white chocolate and yogurt with pistachio ice-cream and passion fruit (£7) - and when we became fixated by the playboy figure on the next table (all silver hair and Italian suit), to the point of inventing a life story including marriage at 19 to woman called Allegra who was later uncovered as a Bolton transsexual called Steve, it was clearly time to go.

To think that Giorgio Locatelli, whose extreme talent was obvious when he cooked at Zafferano, can create dishes seldom if ever seen before in Blighty, and find time to make his own pasta...This is one tall poppy, I say without regret, that won't be cut down for some time yet.

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Jennifer Sharp.HARPERS & QUEEN.

"Despite its instant success and high-profile clientele, Locanda Locatelli is a warm, unfussy restaurant in the generous style of northern Italy. Prices are sensible, children are welcome, and the food is wonderful. This is genuine Italian cooking, with techniques honed in the finest kitchens of Europe. Brilliant risottos and handmade pasta, ravioli filled with melting shards of osso bucco, sweetbreads served with Roman agro-dolce, heavenly stuffed cabbage, baby mackerel with saffron, rabbit with polenta. It's a must for foodies, fans and friends of Giorgio."

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Brian St Pierre.DECANTER - www.decanter.com.

"Giorgio Locatelli has opened his own place, and it's not just the best Italian restaurant in town, it's one of the best restaurants, full stop."

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Jeremy Wayne.TATLER.

"Giorgio Locatelli - he iz so handsome and his food iz sheer poetry. Tordelli di cipolla rossa, lozenge-like rounds of pasta with red onions in a rich, reduced Chianti sauce. Fab-u-lo-so. I'm tempted by chickpea soup with tuna bottarga. Actually, I'm tempted by everything: veal-shank ravioli; a terrific-looking linguine alle vongole; quail risotto... Locanda is the first restaurant actually to bear Giorgio Locatelli's name - it's a name he should be proud of."

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Tracey MacLeod.THE INDEPENDENT MAGAZINE.

"Locanda Locatelli, the sleek, glamorous restaurant that's currently London's hottest dining destination" - "our nearly faultless meal started with home-made grissini and a dish of grassy olive oil for dipping. Locatelli's style can loosely be described as rustic regional food delivered
with urban panache... Many of the dishes - pan-fried cheese with walnuts and pine kernels, ravioli filled with lemon cream pork ragu, escabeche ofpike - stand out as temptingly unexpected... Veal shank ravioli (was) one of the best pasta dishes I've ever tasted. The flower-shaped parcels of perfect pasta held a meltingly, sticky filling of shredded osso bucco in an intense reduced sauce; a fabulous blend of delicacy and deliquescence...Service is both efficient and relaxed. Equally welcome is the refusal to buy into the high-end regmarole of so many grand restaurants - none of that phone us back to confirm your booking' nonsense,
no cover charge, and no service charge added to the bill."

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AA Gill.THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE.

Table TalkCan anyone explain jazz to me? Stop! Stop right there. It was a rhetorical question. I don’t want an answer. And I don’t want any lists of dead old misogynist junkies with testicular cheeks and bathroom fittings in their gobs that I really should listen to.

What I do want to know - again, rhetorically - is why people who talk about jazz all sound the same. Why do they talk as if their nostrils were wind instruments? How do they manage to make boundless enthusiasm sound like an accountant’s suicide note? why do they collate band members’ names and record labels like 10-year-old baseball fans? A man on the radio has just been telling me that he heard the great John Coltrane only once, in the Croydon Crematorium. Apparently, he did just one number, for an hour and a half (well that’s a good enough reason for not going again). The number, the man said, was My Favourite Things.
Now surely he can’t mean that Favourite Things? Not von Trapp’s Favourite Things? Not Julie, dirndl and Nazi Favourite Things?

The adenoidal dude on the radio has just played bit - and it is. Can you imagine? Can you even begin to fathom the unspeakable purgatory, the hopeless, merciless masochism of being in a room with a lot of jazz trolls, rhythmically rumbling down their noses or wagging their thin, organic, chip-fat hair back and fourth, as some bitch-slapping, elastic-faced junkie goes off piste with Rogers and Hammerstein and doesn’t find his way back for an hour and a half. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And in Croydon. It makes a week on Delhi’s death row sound like first prize.

Jazz is to music what Mexican-Thai fusion is to dinner: no amount of blowing is going to stop it being a filthy mess. It seems to me no accident at all that all jazz players were drunks or junkies. Listening to jazz is precisely like being backed into a corner and having your lapels grabbed by a big bloke who’s off his face and just has t tell you really, really important stuff. You know that you’re going to end up in an arm lock with him sobbing how much he really, really loves you.

I’ve been thinking about all this because I’ve just come to the end of my music.. This happens periodically. I generally listen to music as I write. Lots of different stuff. I get fads and fixations, and dance all on my own in a tartan dressing gown, like Salome - actually, more like a headless baptist. Last week, I got a bee in my bonnet for Shostakovich and bought the lot (except the jazz), and listened to it all.

But now I don’t know. I can’t think of anything I want to hear. All my life I’ve had my Desert Island Disks list in my head, but if Sue called right now, all I could come up with would be natural history birdsong.

When I get like this, I tend to think that maybe I should try jazz again. But by syncopated synchronicity there was the troll on the wireless with his Favourite Things. And it pulled me back from the edge. I was this close to Charlie “Bird” Parker and men who rub themselves up and down double basses.

Which brings me to a pair of questions that I really do want answers to. Is it possible to be gay and like jazz? Or, as I suspect, is jazz the musical equivalent of stock-car racing and flat-pack furniture - genetic proof of heterosexuality?

I also want to know if anyone has ever actually been laid to jazz. I know it’s all supposed to be steaming and decadent, but frankly, I suspect that, for women, jazz is as erotic as weeping cankers and comedy farting. Personally, I cant see how anyone could turn down the lights, slip into a short silky robe, put on Kenny Ball and then have one.

There’s mood jazz playing at Locanda Locatelli, which is the only thing wrong with the place. (Actually, there’s one other thing, but I’ll get to that.) Giorgio Locatelli his reputation at Zafferano in Belgravia. He left a year ago and did a spot of consulting. When it was rumoured that he was opening a new restaurant in the Churchill Inter-Continental hotel, it went round the restaurant business like a saxophone solo. It was depressing. The synthesis of good chefs and international hotels has not been happy.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist (you don’t even have to be a chef) to understand what’s in it for the hotel. Their dining rooms are morgues of gastronomic indifference, smelling of breakfast and functions. Their overheads are stupendous, and their stuck in a city that dines out. Chefs, on the other hand, quickly find the bean-counting and demands of hierarchical corporations soul-destroying. Big hotels kill the silly geese that scramble the golden eggs.

But Locatelli’s room is self-contained, with it’s own entrance and has been toffed up with characteristic sombre grace by the designer David Collins. Most of the lavish criticism spooned onto Collins’ plate boils down to the fact that he’s just too damn successful. If a new restaurant hasn’t been designed by him then it has been done by someone who is ripping him off. Let me say that I think that this is one of the best: comfortable but not sloppy; elegant without being fay; modern as opposed to modish; discreet, but avoiding dingy. It’s a very very good room to eat dinner in.

Now, it’s easy to say that Locatelli is the best Italian chef in London. It’s easy, because it’s so pre-eminently obvious. Zafferano is one of the few restaurants that could have felt justifiably insulted with just one Michelin star. And here, he has done better.

The dinner I had started with a shared plate of gnocchi with little artichokes. It was sublime. No, sublime is too butch a word for this ethereal dish, made with potatoes and artichokes specially coaxed from Italy and known to the kitchen by their Christian names.

Next, I had hand-made spaghetti with tuna meatball bolognese (agree to walk naked through the West End singing Tit Willow with a gardenia sprouting from between your clenched buttocks to try this - it’s worth it), then a precise and delicious lamb stew with mushy polenta.

The Blonde and I took Willy, the filthy rich banker and Christiane, the goddess of war. Between us, we ate the card, every dish and mouthful bringing fourth paeans of praise. I could tell you what they said, but it would be a dull list of gasps and footballers' adjectives. This is as good as you’ll eat anywhere; food prepared with panache and care and skill and a hospitable nature.

I’m told the house wine is excellent. The service was easy and attentive, and it’s not that expensive. But even if the wine had been vinegar, the service savage and the food had cost a Romanian steel plant, I would still recommend that you go. It’s properly brilliant.

And now, the other bad thing. It did cost a Romanian steel plant. On the banquette next to me was the Prime Minister in a t-shirt - the Prime Minister in a t-shirt, with a Cherie on top. Christiane says I shouldn’t mention it, but she’s an American journalist and has standards. Frankly, I think you should be told, because if anything could ruin a perfect dinner, Tony in a t-shirt could.

I’m giving Locatelli five stars (our first). The fifth one is for something that wont make any difference to you as a customer - the fact that he employs a unnecessarily large brigade, because, as he would put it if he could speak even remedial english: “I want everyone to work forty hours, they need time to have proper lives, girlfriends, families. It’s not good being shouted at and being worked like a slave.” This is pathetically rare in kitchens with first class pretensions, so Locatelli gets top marks, because he’s enthusiastic and brilliant, but not at the expense of others.

Of course, this does make a difference to customers. I think you can taste it. Food is just an ingredient in a bigger dish.

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Fay Maschler.EVENING STANDARD.

"A four-course meal is the only way not to be deprived of antipasti such as the salad of green leaves of Swiss chard accompanying the wide, white stalks spread with fontina cheese before being breadcrumbed and fried, while still enjoying pasta dishes such as the ravishing ravioli filled with melting osso buco or the soft mushroom gnocchetti laid with slices of black truffle like curling carpet tiles. In the main course, excellent grilled loin of beef is healthily set off by wilted radiccio di Treviso, that long, stripy cousin of the less-interesting round red radiccio, in season just now. Animelle di vitello in agrodolce is one of several Venetian-influenced sweet-sour dishes and I thought it one of the best treatments of sweetbreads I had ever encountered."

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Marina O'Loughlin.METRO.

"Locanda Locatelli is just brilliant... Throughout our meal, there wasn't a missed beat or duff note: this was the closest to culinary perfection I've encountered in many a long dinner... My starter wins my personal award for dish of the decade. Tiny, hand-formed gnocchi incorporating wild mushrooms into the potato dough were sizzled in butter with crisped sage then topped with a delirious amount of shaved black truffle. The nuttiness of the butter, fragrance of the herb and musky boskiness of the fungus came together to form a subtle taste with the addictive quality of the finest bitter chocolate. Awesome... Breast of duck came with an extra, unbilled confit leg and a compelling accompaniment of almost-raw broccoli, chilli and spelt. Like everything else we ate, it tasted of itself - heightened and enhanced, not bludgeoned, by its garnishes."

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