Restaurant review Mele e Pere, 46 Brewer Street, London.

So here we are, standing in a queue outside Pitt Cue Co, the red-hot new barbecue specialists in Soho, on the coldest night of the year. (I'm surely not the first to rechristen it Pitt Queue Co.) A woman walks past and pauses. "What the hell are you doing, waiting out here in the cold?" she gasps. "It's not like there isn't anywhere else to eat around here..." And that's how we end up in Mele e Pere.

Perhaps the cold has iced up my brain, as it takes me a while to realise the brightly lit corner building with a window full of glass apples and pears, and just the tip of a staircase showing, is the restaurant, a spanking-new Italian (mele e pere, duh).

Mr M and I trot down the tiled steps to see a long, copper-topped bar and a low-ceilinged room, with rather attractive mismatched wooden tables and chairs.

The walls have Anglepoise lamps of differing vintages attached to illuminate the tables. A neat trick, but the effect is somewhat spoilt on the back wall by four ghastly abstract paintings which frankly would be better off in the shadows, if not in a skip outside. (Apologies to owner Peter Hughes and co-owner/chef Andrea Mantovani, both late of the ace Wild Honey, who clearly have otherwise excellent taste, but really...)

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