Oily, but very, very slick

HOTEL DU VIN AND BISTRO; 14 Southgate Street, Winchester, Hampshire SO23 9EF. Tel: 01962 841414 Open daily from noon to 2pm and from 7pm to 9.30pm. Average price per person, pounds 20. Sunday lunch table d'hote, pounds 19.50. All credit cards ac cepted

During the Rosemary West trial in Winchester last year, members of the global press pack were pulling each other's ears and hair to get a room and a table at the Hotel du Vin and Bistro - a stylish little private enterprise, recently chosen as Egon Ronay's Newcomer of the Year.

The last decade has seen a wind of change whooshing through British restaurants, replacing ketchuppy prawn cocktails and pineapple rings on gammon steaks with all manner of olive breads and ciabattas, exotic salads, and chargrilled this, that and the other. If we are lucky, the Hotel du Vin and Bistro will turn out to be an early puff in a similar wind - or ideally, tornado with accompanying volcanic eruption - about to hit British hotels, tearing gilt-framed pictures of peaches and bits of climbing carpet from walls, ripping out random indoor lamp-posts and fences, smashing pretend Georgian windows full of pottery piggies dressed as shepherdesses, and replacing them with things designed to make guests feel happy, not sad and bemused.

The Hotel and Bistro is what you always hope for when you need to spend the night in a city and find the choice is a pounds 200-a-night four-poster bed in a former stately home three miles away; or a pounds 75 hutch with a fake- wood desk and a trouser press which makes you want your mum. Run by Robin Hutson, formerly managing director of the posh Chewton Glen Hotel, and Gerard Basset, Chewton Glen's former sommelier, the hotel, though eminently civilised, has none of the stiffness and formality of a posh hotel. It is set in a lovely 1715 town house with light, beautifully proportioned rooms and a walled garden. Bedrooms are designed with originality, class and care. There are big, comfortable beds with fine linen, mini-bars, an antique here, an up-to-the-minute wrought iron bedstead there, but with rooms as accessibly priced as in your bog standard chain hotel (pounds 69- pounds 99 a night).

The way they've pulled it is to cut down on certain extras - room-service is deemed de trop - and cunningly, through Gerard's connections, all the rooms are sponsored by a different wine company. As you would expect from Basset, one of the country's leading sommeliers, there is also a cellar to die of liver failure for. Prices are more than fair; a daily selection at between pounds 10 and pounds 20 is backed up by a cellar list of over 160 bins.

In place of a trellised plastic shrubbery offering slabs of meat under warm-up lamps and overpriced Fisherman's Platters is the Bistro, a two room restaurant with wooden floors, antique chairs, bare-topped tables, wine memorabilia, dried hops, oil paintings and distressed butter yellow walls, successfully combining high-ceilinged restaurant elegance with the cosiness and informality of a bistro. On Easter Monday lunchtime the atmosphere was full of jollity - chaps in shirts and jumpers, here a denim pinafore dress, there a Country Casuals two-piece. As if to stress one's good fortune in finding such a city centre oasis, the view across the road is of Chompers Sandwich Bar and Herbert's Hairdressers: "Appointments not always necessary for Ladies and Gentlemen's Hairdressing."

The bare table-tops, unashamedly festooned with stain-rings, were balanced by large, crisp damask table cloths, a mini bread board, bread knife and crisp half-baguette, and ice-cold champagne glasses. The lunchtime menu offers a tempting range of predominantly Italian peasant-type salady starters - bresaola or smoked salmon with rocket and parmesan; mozzarella and tomato bruschetta; chargrilled asparagus with red peppers - and for the main courses, grilled lamb, chicken, mullet and mackerel.

Our choices arrived in large white bowls with black pepper sprinkled round the edges; an imaginative, if weird, new addition to the intriguing twilight world of the garnish. My friend thought her scallops were very good. My goat's cheese crostini was excellent, hot and gooey in the middle and solid at the edges, nestling on a mixed-leaf salad dressed like Elizabeth Hurley on a particularly good day.

We were delighted to see our friend the pepper garnish reappearing around our main courses. Grilled mackerel was a work of art, spectacularly bronze and metallic on a golden glaze of tomato confit. "Hmm, I think they've provided a rather over-generous sea of oil," said my friend, who, having been drawn to the mackerel for its vitamin and fatty acid content, was disapproving of unnecessary fatty oil. She was cheered by the perfect accompanying vegetables, and even more so by the surprise appearance of "a very well-shaped young man" stark naked at a window above Chompers Sandwich Bar.

Unfortunately I had my back to the tempting scene; my grilled chicken with courgette, tomatoes, pine-nuts and basil couldn't quite compete. The large chunks of courgette did not, alas, taste nice - short on cooking time, I reckoned - and I too found my sauce a bit on the oily side, but the chicken was great; first class bistro food.

There was a dessert for every taste - here a chargrilled banana, there a caramelised white chocolate croissant, there a tiramisu, there sticky toffee pudding - every taste, that is except that for an unadorned vitamin. My friend's comment on her red fruit gratin was that there was too much gratin and not enough red fruit. I was more than keen on the delicious vanilla- and calorie- stuffed gratin, more so than on my

bitter chocolate tart; which was somewhat heavier than the moist, dark rich, succulent, melting chocolate experience I had been imagining.

When coffee arrived, however, things were back on top form. We both agreed that the lunch had provided top flight bistro food, but that the pricing (pounds 10-pounds 14 for main courses, pounds 85 for lunch for two - even allowing for service and pounds 20 for wine) had perhaps suggested we were in for more of a taste explosion than we'd enjoyed. It would be wrong to carp, however. The service, ambience, thoughtful touches and lovely surroundings are superb. A Hotel du Vin and Bistro in every city would be a roving reporter's dream. !