The chef changed earlier this year, but the menu at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park hotel’s restaurant remains luxuriously French. Cru isn’t quite in the same class as The Real Greek and Eyre Brothers, but it feels animated by the same enthusiasm. All in all, another good reason to visit Hoxton Square; get there quick, before Terence Conran does.Cru, 2-4 Rufus Street, Hoxton, London N1 (020-7729 5252). When cooked, the stalk is fibrous and pulpy, like celery, and as a support for a well-reared piece of beef, it fell desperately short; it was like going to see Ray Charles in concert and finding out Hear’Say are the opening act.Well-kept cheeses from Neal’s Yard and a slightly dusty-tasting vanilla pound cake rounded off what had been an intriguing and largely satisfying meal, which came to about £30 a head before wine was added – and plenty of wine was added.The Shoreditch/Hoxton area is now home to an interestingly heterogeneous selection of good restaurants run by chef- restaurateurs who care passionately about what they’re doing. I once spent an afternoon painting a cardoon – it’s a kind of thistly cousin of the artichoke – and believe me, it’s far more rewarding to paint than to eat. Full-flavoured roast Glenarm salmon was well served by its Oriental trimmings – a mirin-caramelised turnip plus the kind of deep-fried shredded cabbage that stands in for seaweed in Chinese restaurants.

The kitchen proved remarkably accommodating to our foibles, and uncomplainingly recast two dishes to suit the no-flesh, no-dairy diet of one of my companions. Co-owner Vincent Gasnier’s enthusiasm for his well-arranged and annotated list was so infectious that we ended up ordering from it more freely than we intended; he even leaves his tasting notes for each bottle with the table so you can do your best Jilly Goolden impression.Again, the fish was the star when it came to our main courses. Two French brasserie dishes – wood-pigeon breast with a pear and walnut salad, and warm folds of ox-tongue with a nubbly pearl barley salad – demonstrated a competent touch with the mainstream repertoire. Only one starter was exceptional: an orange-smoked mackerel, which had been chargrilled until the skin was fantastically crisp and salty, and served curled over a bed of wasabi-spiced butter beans.As our meal continued, a number of nice touches reinforced our impression that here was a restaurant run primarily for the pleasure of its guests. But he has sensibly limited his fusion experiments, so that relatively plain dishes stand as alternatives to some of the wackier offerings, such as steamed mussels with hijiki fritters and wasabi tobico.A soup of smoked aubergine, arrocina bean and squash sounded exciting, but didn’t set the pulses racing; a thousand gourmets could have been pinned down and tortured and I doubt that one would have got further than “beans” in pinpointing its ingredients. The open-plan space is so impeccably downtown, it might have been rigged up by a production designer to convey modern inner-city living, and the presence of Cold Feet’s Fay Ripley at a nearby table reinforced our impression that we’d stumbled on to the set of a TV drama about urban thirtysomethings.The menu is as thoroughly modern as the customers, spicing up European brasserie fare with Maghrebi and Oriental influences. Head chef Gianni Vatteroni’s Sugar Club background is evident from the number of ingredients which call out for footnotes.

Giant pillars, whitewashed brick walls and colour-field paintings supply an informal backdrop for a young clientele sporting vintage Adidas and surprised hair. You can even buy the raw ingredients of those dishes and attempt to recreate them in the privacy of your own loft space.Loft-living seems to have inspired the look of Cru, which occupies a converted warehouse just behind the White Cube gallery in fashionable Hoxton Square. There’s also a bar area serving tapas-style snacks, and a counter selling delicacies and dishes from the menu. There’s a restaurant, with a Sugar Club graduate installed in the kitchen and The Savoy’s Anton Edelmann as an adviser; dishes are designed to complement the eclectic bu accessible wine list, for wine is at the heart of the whole venture, as Cru’s name implies. Its owners, two refugees from the City plus ex-Hotel du Vin sommelier Vincent Gasnier, have created a convivial and flexible space for Shoreditch’s sybaritic multi-taskers, and are presiding over it with admirable attention to detail. In the former, the staff look you in the eye when you arrive, rather than busily scanning the booking list for your name.