If you’re eating on the move then the two slices of bread option will generally apply but when

If you’re eating on the move then the two slices of bread option will generally apply, but when you have the luxury of a little time, a place to sit down, and a knife and fork, then this opens up all sorts of possibilities.A few weeks ago I was driving down the Edgware Road – the heartland of Middle Eastern cuisine in London – and I just had a Ranoush juice chicken sandwich craving. There’s more to making sandwiches than just getting two slices of bread and chucking in an interesting-sounding filling. Sandwich bars have taken over our high streets and in most major cities you can’t walk more than 100 yards on a main street without clocking one. They are sometimes inspiring places to get some good filling ideas, but on the whole, ready-made and packaged sarnies have their restrictions with presentation and, of course, shelf life. La Noisette, 164 Sloane Street, London SW1, (020-7750 5000)Food Ambience Service Summer Favourites set menu, £55; three courses, £45; chef’s Inspirational Tasting Menu, £65. But two solidly old-fashioned desserts restore the sense of poise – a really excellent strawberry trifle and a fine peach melba, which I’m mildly disappointed to receive beneath one of those cages of spun sugar (a very good way, I’ve discovered, to sustain multiple lacerations of the upper palate).

Fortunately, a sensational lavender fudge arrives with the petits fours to soothe the wounds. I don’t know whether the prozzies will return, drawn here by an ancient homing instinct, but if so they’re going to eat very well indeed. The pre-dessert – a watermelon foam with cantaloupe sorbet and a dice of honeydew – is the first wobble, the spume oddly tart and the sprinkle of space-dust pointlessly modish. There are no ambivalent feelings about my Welsh lamb with sweetbreads “?a bouqueti?” though – wonderfully tender meat and yielding glands served in a sauce that renders even the aspirin bitterness of baby turnips palatable.La Noisette is classical enough in its approach to push the cheese trolley forward at this point – before the desserts – and we’re greedy enough not to push it away without sampling some – including a melting Brie that virtually makes its own way on to our plates, and a deliciously gamey Langres. Her Barbary duck, served with peaches, strikes me (a lover of duck) as very good indeed, a subtle touch of anise in the sauce doing something very special to the peach juices and, in turn, the meat. For Deborah unfortunately, the Chinese spice stirs memories of a recent duck-related queasiness in Beijing, involving parts of the bird that probably never make it past La Noisette’s kitchen porter. This looks wonderful – a puddle of pale green, dotted with the blush of the sorbet and the spice-flecked shrimps – and tastes even better, all kinds of delayed sweetnesses layering themselves into each mouthful.

I order the local heirloom tomatoes, prepared differently each day, but on this one accompanied by two crab-cakes and a tarry smear of tapenade, which is fine, without entirely revealing why these particular tomatoes should have been handed down from generation to generation.We agree that Deborah has won the first course – but I pull back level with the mains. In Deborah’s case it’s one of the menu’s list of Summer Favourites – an almond gazpacho with smoked paprika shrimp and tomato sorbet. full of prozzies.” But if he was thinking of the same place, they’ve all gone now – replaced by a slightly retro-looking interior that has borrowed its colour scheme from a coffee ?air. It is very Knightsbridge – not an entirely good thing in my view, but no doubt highly congenial to the poor exhausted ladies who will stagger across the road with bags full of bags.
We start eating well before we order – with a little swirl of herbed labneh (a Middle Eastern-influenced yoghurty dip) and some olives arriving first and a shot glass of artichoke velout?ollowing soon after, accompanied by a miniature ice-cream cone stuffed with tomato fondant, tomato granita and a tomato foam.