5 Pollen St, London W1

Dinner for two, with wine, £170

Stefano Cavallini makes his risotto with champagne. It's unusual, perhaps, for an Italian to deviate from the straitjacket of regional cooking, but not sacrilege. Risotto enjoys too many different incarnations to demand purity of concept. In any case, Cavallini's risotto deserves attention not for the chef's sense of invention but for its ability to represent on a single plate the essence of an entire restaurant.

The essence of 5 Pollen St is wealth. Wealth of ingredient, wealth of colour, and wealth of patron. It's a measure of the changing face of central London that its boldest openings aim for the narrowest of markets. The restaurant, an arresting space in which the wall art competes ferociously with the wallpaper, is full of non-doms and hedgies, the soft light and scuffed mirror walls reflecting spring tans and bare-backed wives. Dinner in this alternative world comes at a price you don't discuss and begins at a Euro-friendly 9.30pm, before which the restaurant is almost empty.

We start with a couple of classic blinis. The aforementioned risotto is rich and gooey. Clogged with butter and creamy champagne, it delivers a cardiovascular rush of guilt—gilded peasant food. Less successful is the excellent Parma ham, adorned but unimproved by a mini bowl of pickled vegetables and gnocco fritto: dank pastry parcels full of air. The waiter pushes a dish of deep-fried courgettes, and it proves an excellent companion for the lobster—the salty crunch of vegetable a perfect foil for the sweet, buttery meat. It's a rich man's fish and chips.

David Woodward