Restaurant review, Machiavelli, London WC2.

Machiavelli 69 Long Acre, London WC2E 9JS
Contact: 020 7240 2125 www.machiavellifood.co.uk
Price: Three courses: £25.55

There's a square mile of Covent Garden that is like a restaurant theme park, but by no means wall-to-wall excellence – one time in six you'll walk into a haven of intoxicating meat creations and beautiful people, the other five times it'll be pasta that tastes of plastic and demoralised theatre-goers wondering why, when they've already sat through Mamma Mia!, they should have to put up with food that tastes of the 1980s as well.

I'd been in Machiavelli a good few minutes before I was able to come down on one side or the other – the top floor, a delicatessen, is a little cutesy and overpriced (all chalkboards and laboriously perfect shelf-stacking). Downstairs I got the first whiff of good fortune when I saw someone else's fish, packed in greaseproof paper, great fat mussels peeping out. It looked like a 3-D map, the landscape of deliciousness.

Simple bistro chairs were rendered unusual with an ash-blond colour scheme and refectory tables. S and I had a table to ourselves, however: he'd just been headhunted by a high-class dating agency (yes, they really do that), so he was like a dog with two tails. This will probably be the last dinner he has for a while where he doesn't have to worry about how much onion anything contains.

Read more at telegraph.co.uk