Ferrari's Bexley

If you have to be in that part of Kent - and I live nearby in Crayford (where there is one restaurant and a Nandos plus some low-end Chinese/Indian places) - and you are used to good food, you'd not do too badly in going to Ferraris. Probably. We had one disastrous experience there out of several good ones, and to put it right the manager gave us a free meal, which was a good sign. In return we have gone back a few times. The menu doesn't seem to have changed in two years, but trying something different the other day - the lunchtime special - I was pleasantly surprised. Although when the waitress came to tell us the shiraz we had chosen was out of stock, we had actively to step in and prevent her opening an alternative she had brought back with her that we did not want to try. If you can get a seat towards the back, do so - it is cramped at the front, where it feels as if you are seated at the same table as complete strangers. Hard to rate it. By local standards it's five stars, by London as a whole it's closer to three. But we keep going back.

First visit today on a busy Saturday lunchtime. The restaurant itself is pleasant enough, and the greeting brisk and warm. In general the service made up in enthusiasm what it might lack in experience. The chief issue here is the quality of the food. My starter portion of a fettucine with seafood combined pasta that was a little overcooked with a mushy tomato-flavoured sauce in which the seafood was mixed. It looked pretty uninspiring and tasted that way too. Our mains of liver were swimming in oil , the roast potatoes soft, the liver had far more tubular tissue than you'd expect in a restaurant, and the side of zucchini fritti , instead of neat batons or shoestrings as you'd normally expect, was a few very large pieces of zucchini so that it scarcely tasted fried at all. My expresso was served half way to cold and had obviously been left hanging around before being brought to me. On balance of the food and drink we were given here, only my wife's Bruschetta starter was of a quality you might hope for. Everything else fell short, and if at £67 I think value wasn't great, that's not because I think that's expensive; its because , I'm afraid, we didn't think it was good enough. Sorry.