Address: Alloro, London W1

Alloro is okay. Smart new Italian place. Classy, good-taste design. Proficient service. Capable cooking. Interesting wine list. Reasonably priced, by London standards. So why don't I feel happier about it?

You remember the good old days of Italian restaurants, when the warmth of the welcome was in inverse ratio to the quality of the food, when waiters brandished pepper grinders the size of an Apollo rocket, when pollo was always sopressa and when puddings were always zabaglione? Oh, those dear, dead, innocent days. Well, not so dead, perhaps. There are still a few practitioners of those dark arts here and there, purveying the same spurious, bastardised version of Italian cooking and pandering to the snobbery and ignorance of a certain class of English eater, who put a higher price on the theatre of the fawning waiter than on decent food.

At first sight, Alloro is not like one of these at all. The greeting is polite, not in the least smarmy. The floor is wooden, not tiled. The walls are pale olive green, not white. The wine list is peopled with curiosities from Sardinia and Friuli, not the Vernaccia and Valpolicella of old. The food, too, has had something of a leg-up, what with terrina di verdure grigliate con mozzarella di bufala, gnocchi di patate con gallinacci and petto d'anatra arrosto caramellizato al miele con salsa di vino rosso, to mention just a few of the items on the menu when Angostura and I settled in for lunch.

Nothing very surprising about these dishes, you might say. There's nothing very Italian about them, either - and that is the trouble with Alloro, and a raft of new Italian restaurants. The dishes bear the imprint of frenchification or, worse, anglicisation, where sauces, vegetables and garnishes are used to flesh out the bare bones of a dish, thereby creating a complicated gustatory edifice. They may be delicious in their own way, but they are not Italian.

In the course of a recent trip to southern Italy, I was reminded again and again that the essence of Italian food is its simplicity - or single-mindedness, if you prefer. When you order meat, that's what you get: meat. Ask for fish, and fish appears on the plate, with a slice of lemon. No sauce. No gravy. No vegetables, garnishes, condiments. No distractions. This lack of adornment puts huge emphasis on the quality of the ingredient: it stands entirely by its own excellence, or falls for the lack of it.

My first course at Alloro consisted of culatello originale, finocciona, pane carasau and pomodorini secchi. Culatello is cured rump of pork, a speciality of Zibello in Emilia Romagna and one of the most expensive hams to be had. Finocciona is a salame flavoured with fennel, and is characteristic of Tuscany. Pane carasau is Sardinia's answer to Melba toast: very thin and crisp, and very nice when splattered with halves of cherry tomato, which had been partially dried, I would guess, in the oven, there not having been a whole lot of sun in Mayfair recently. There was nothing wrong with any of these elements individually. Indeed, there was a whole lot right with them - silky, subtle culatello; superb, piercing and delicate finocchiona; intense tomatoes with friable bread. The only trouble was having them all on the same plate. It was a kind of Italian fusion food.

The same thoughts occurred with the fillet of John Dory with fried potatoes and lemon, olive oil and basil sauce. The fish was superb, tense and muscular, as John Dory should be when fresh, but all it needed was a little lemon juice and salt. The potatoes would have done nicely served separately, and the basil sauce would have done nicely on another dish (although I can't think of one off hand). Angostura's monkfish wrapped in courgette and cooked on a skewer with tomato salad was the same: monkfish - splendid; courgette - fine; tomatoes - just about okay.

But what about the unadvertised shavings of fennel? And the green sauce? It could have been a dish in any halfway-decent French restaurant with no specific regional culinary allegiance. The extra-virgin olive oil ice cream that came with strawberries in wine was an ingenious conceit, interesting rather than a giant leap forward in gastronomic pleasure.

And that was that. A brace of Bellinis, a bottle of brilliant, floral Vermentino di Capichera from Sardinia, and an unexplained £3.50 surcharge on the monkfish skewer produced a bill of just over £100, of which the food accounted for £48. Come to think of it, that bill would have been the equivalent of dinner at one of those Da Mimmo's and Trattoria Gennaros of beloved memory. As their spiritual descendant, Alloro will probably do very well