Basement bars are always difficult to get right, as there is little chance of passing trade. Dabbous is a wonderful bar, with a restaurant attached. I'm sure that's not the way it would want to be known, but, whilst the food is good, it is the fabulous cocktails whisked up in the basement that will get me back.

Whilst the upstairs dinning room is white and airy, the basement is an industrial bunker: exposed air conditioning ducts, bare concrete and metal (the loo is secreted away behind a wall of steel, marked by an almost hidden sign). The cocktails are terrific and inventive: the glass for the Accomplice comes rubbed with a sage leaf, the Thriller in Perilla has a shiso (perilla) leaf poking out of it and Cat Diesel is a rum based short, heightened with cigar syrup. On its own, the syrup is just another sweetener. When mixed with rum and egg white, the rich tobacco flavours come to the fore.

The restaurant is perfectly pleasant, without being outstanding. The chef (and owner) is ex-Texture, and it shows; the style being very modern and light. Small plates, lots of flavours, lots of interesting ingredients. Plates are all pretty as pictures. Jackson Pollock ones mainly. It is all well presented and well structured, without ever really being outstanding.

The menu structure is very a la mode, with a list of starters and mains, but no real differentiation. We were encouraged to take four or five of these, mixing and matching between the two lists, so between us we managed to go through most of the menu. And this really adds up: at an average of £11/12 a dish (and there is little difference either in cost or size of the starter/main dish), this can mount rapidly.

Steak tartar (with more cigar flavours, this time oil) was a lovely mouthful of meat. The fab egg was a hollowed out shell, restuffed with the yolk and a few mushrooms, nestling in a bed of hay, no doubt intended to invoke thoughts of the farmyard. Goose was terrific: a thin slice of breast, sweetened with… More