23 Euston Road, London NW1 (020 7843 2221). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £100
From the outside, the muraled King's Cross building which houses Karpo looks like a self-consciously hip Dutch youth hostel. I say this fondly. I spent a significant amount of my late-teenage summer holidays in self-consciously hip Dutch youth hostels, those all-you-can-eat buffets of sweet hormonal angst, narcotics and chlamydia. Inside, the echoes don't immediately fade. Karpo – apparently she's the Greek goddess of the fruits of the earth – is the bolt-on restaurant of an inner-city hotel, and looks like it. There are refectory-style tables and benches at one end, and, at the other, by the open kitchen, a stunted atrium with a living wall of foliage bolting upwards to the sunlight. I could imagine gloomy Finnish backpackers, three weeks from their last bath, holing up here over endless games of backgammon.
The whole effect is softened by clever bits of art and lighting, a bunch of produce laid out across the bar and, most importantly, the dishes coming out of that open kitchen. Karpo serves the sort of food we really want to eat (at least until dessert comes along to ruin the party). When it opened a few months back, a number of critics did lots of pointing and laughing at the menu. It was, by all accounts, very long. It was also broken up into more options than the book of Exodus has chapters: lunch, brunch, wood-fired oven, not wood-fired oven, larder, cold starters, cupboard under the stairs (I made that last one up). But sometimes it's worth waiting before turning up. American-born chef Daniel Taylor, who has cooked with Rowley Leigh and Jeremy Lee, has taken the hint and simplified it down to starters and mains of a broadly Mediterranean-by-way-of-California bent. There are heirloom tomatoes with goat's curd and olive oil. There are robust pasta dishes and lumps of grilled animal. It reads well and eats rather better.
Palourde clams can go as rubbery as those ear plugs they give you on transatlantic flights if cooked for just a few seconds too long. These were soft and sweet, and came in a deep, fishy broth of the sort you'll happily sniff on your fingers for hours afterwards. In a sweet-soft sea bass ceviche with segments of orange it was the quality of the peppery olive oil that sang out. We also ordered a hunk of country pork pâté with their own coarse piccalilli, and though it was a little dry, it did not dishonour the pig.
For our main we shared the special, a fabulous bone-in veal chop with perfect asparagus and an anchovy sauce at £40 for two, a terrific piece of meat, treated with the sort of love and affection usually heaped on an only child. Almost literally so: the chef told us later, with a pout, that it was the only one he'd sold that night. The rest were missing out. For carbs we had the thick, unctuous macaroni cheese which, in London, is currently the dirty dish of choice. Done as well as it is here, the top properly crusted, I can see why. With this we drank a 500ml carafe of a white Loire and the same of a Grenache Noir, from an interesting list which offers lots of well-priced opportunities to mix and match.
And if we'd left then, we'd have come out humming the veal chop. But we did insist upon ordering dessert, didn't we? These were coming from the other end of the restaurant where they were arriving, we were told, from a basement pastry kitchen. One taste of the horrendously burnt and bitter tarte tatin – it made us pull the sort of face toddlers confect just before bursting into tears – and we concluded that this basement kitchen was where they had imprisoned the hooded pastry gimp, handcuffed to the wall bars, only able to issue cries for help by knocking out nightmarish confections. A pecan pie really wasn't much better. It was dry and the surface had an odd, solid texture as if it had healed over, like a scab. It was just so jarring compared to the quality of everything else. Free the poor creature from his dungeon, please. Free the pastry gimp. Stop the terrible waste of sugar. And our suffering.
Desserts aside, Karpo is a welcome arrival in a redeveloping King's Cross, which has become the home of too many chains and identikit caffs, and far too little real cooking. It may look like a Dutch youth hostel, but it's actually rather grown up.
Jay Rayner's eBook My Dining Hell is available from Amazon and all eBook retailers at £1.99
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
