Food & Drink: In an adventure playground for the palate: Emily Green delights in Bistrot Bruno, a new Soho restaurant where the moonlighting chef has created a strange and wonderful menu

THE MENU at Bistrot Bruno, a newly converted little restaurant in Soho, reads disconcertingly: scallops on puff pastry (with) home-made piccalilli; sardine ravioli with salsa verde; beer-and-cherry ice-cream.

No, London restaurant cookery has not flipped its lid. At least not here. Strange though the dishes sound, the ones I sampled at Bistrot Bruno were all good and more than occasionally delicious.

The quality is no mystery. The Bruno in question (and the author of 'Bruno's Moussaka') is Bruno Loubet, chef of the Four Seasons restaurant at the Inn on the Park hotel in Mayfair.

And so he remains. Remarkably, the Inn on the Park is allowing its talented young chef to moonlight with this far more humble establishment. That kind of thing makes demands. On top of cooking at the Four Seasons, Mr Loubet will dash over to the Bistrot Bruno between lunch and dinner to put his head together with what the owners refer to as his 'team'. They will write menus, to change monthly, and the team will knock the stuff out.

At the Four Seasons, where a three-course meal with wine can cost from pounds 40 to pounds 60 per person, the chef's task involves rather elaborate presentation. I once sampled a rabbit terrine in a beetroot jelly, set in small squares. The upshot was a sort of gamey, quilted bortsch: a nice, but expensive, joke.

Less fuss, but perhaps no less thought or humour, goes into the food at Bistrot Bruno. The spicy relish in the dish of scallops, puff pastry and piccalilli has echoes of a burger bar. They could call it MacScallops, but it is too good for that. The piccalilli works extremely well as a filler between a round of raw scallops and a thin layer of golden, crisp puff pastry. The whole is set in lightly dressed salad leaves, including oakleaf, frisee and rocket.

Another crazy-sounding dish was 'pan-fried trout, sour cabbage, smoked herring cream'. Elizabeth David used to lament over chefs persisting with this dreadful phrase 'pan-fried'. Where else would one fry? In a steamer? In a teapot? And the partnering of trout and oily herring sounds dreadful.

It was anything but. I would defy anyone to find the herring on the plate of two perfectly cooked trout fillets bedded on deliciously cooked cabbage. The sauce? A light beurre blanc. Yet there was, unmistakably, a taste of smoke. The herring had been cleverly infused into the sauce, leaving the sensation that the cabbage had somehow been smoked rather than pickled. Probably only a Frenchman would try to jump through these hoops, and certainly only a serious talent would succeed.

What the menu refers to as 'traditional onion soup' was utterly traditional, the onions properly cooked down to a sweet and melting state. But few grandmeres bourgeoises would bung a small cheese souffle into the bowl, as Bistrot Bruno does. Jugged hare was completely homely and daringly gamey, if a bit dry. David Wilson, chef at the Peat Inn in Fife and no slouch with hares, could give Mr Loubet some pointers here, down to getting more of the gunshot out of the meat.

We sampled almost all of the puddings. Beer-and-cherry ice-cream was an ingenious combination, like a fruity Belgian beer taken to its logical conclusion. Most impressive was a liquorice ice-cream topping a rich dish of winter fruits cooked in red wine. The flavour came in waves - cream, then what tasted like caramel, then liquorice on the finish. It was the perfect answer to the likes of stewed prunes. A chocolate tart in coffee cream was exemplary. Ditto clever little 'cookies', buttery pastry sandwiching a surprising mixture of apple sauce and mascarpone flavoured with - yes - rosemary.

The restaurant itself is long, narrow and handsomely modern. Tables are somewhat tightly fitted: a few could go. The odd seahorse motif attests to the site's previous incarnation as the seafood restaurant L'Hippocampe. Bistrot Bruno is owned by Pierre and Kathleen Condou, the same couple who set up L'Hippocampe. Their long acquantaince with Mr Loubet led to the change. As always, they run the restaurant with warm solicitousness and absolute dedication to good food.

Various abstract panels on the walls may come down soon. Last week, one came down of its own volition, narrowly missing the head of Fay Maschler, restaurant critic of the London Evening Standard. This veteran of 20 years' restaurant reviewing has seen much worse, and still gave the restaurant a high rating, of two stars.

Bistrot Bruno, 63 Frith Street, London W1 (071-734 4545). Three-course meal with wine, coffee, service and VAT approx pounds 25- pounds 30. Open lunch Mon-Fri (from 12.15pm, last orders 2.30pm), and dinner Mon-Sat (from 6.15pm, last orders 11.30pm). No pipes or cigars. Vegetarian meals. Major credit cards.