Number 3 Hereford Road has been a restaurant for a great while, to be precise it has been a restaurant called Veronica’s that tried, (and failed), to woo punters with a promise of authentic “Mediaeval” British cooking. However I have some faint memories of once seeing rocket and Parmesan salad on the menu which isn’t wildly Anglo-Saxon. When you write about restaurants on the internet a booming echo is left behind, so much so that if you search the web for Veronica’s a host of sites will happily offer you an address, reviews even the booking telephone number. The problem is that Veronica’s is long gone. Now there’s a hot new incumbent and the resto has been re-named “Hereford Road”. But yards of old, dead information still whirls around in the ether, it must be simpler for the techies to just abandon it than to spend time housekeeping by deleting defunct entries. My advice is to check the date on any web-published restaurant piece and treat the opinions with extra caution if there isn’t one.

It has been a blisteringly good autumn for London’s dining public. In the determined flurry of restaurant openings there seems to have been a succession of hits – Hibiscus, Alain Ducasse, Le Café Anglais and now Hereford Road. Perhaps one of the reasons why there are not more restaurants opened by disciples of Fergus Henderson and St John is that his mantra of honest, authentic, British dishes carefully made using the finest British ingredients is very hard to follow. Cooking that's so outwardly simple and so very delicious is a difficult challenge, but “Hoorah”, at Hereford Road they bring it off.

To the front of the resto there are some banquets facing the open kitchen, while to the rear there is a dining room with a large round window in the ceiling. Sit under it if you can, on a sunny day there’s a delightful shaft of light and you can look up to see blue skies.

The menu reads very like the one at St John – dishes may differ but the spirit remains true. Salt duck comes with pickled chicory – just as nice as the pickled chicory on the menu at Le Café Anglais. Lambs kidneys on toast are perfectly cooked – faintly pink within and with buttery juices soaking into the toast. The salad of Jerusalem artichokes shows a deft hand combining differing textures. The main courses range from a peerless roast widgeon on a bed of buttery cabbage with bacon pieces – wholly successful; to tender venison, lightly cooked, and a deep dark red. The whole oxtail for two – served on the bone and about a foot and a half long; rather like a huge, meaty, Flintstone’s corn on the cob - could be seen in the kitchen but only in preparation for a later service. Sticky date pudding was sticky and datey. Fine cheeses are given their moment of glory. The wine list has some modestly priced bottles and service is smooth. By the time you have consumed one of those modestly priced bottles your bill will come out around £80 for two people. That’s good food, fairly priced.

Charles Campion

Hereford Road, 3 Hereford Road, W2 (020 7727 1144)