Patio, London, restaurant review - Telegraph Borscht laden with dumplings (MARTIN POPE) The walls have been repainted a gentle shade of peach, and covered with jolly post-Impressionist paintings (some by Reg Gadney, husband of the Evening Standard's Fay Maschler, the doyenne of our trade and another Patio fan). The samovars have gone, as has the top layer of the thick red carpet in places. But the grandfather clock, a heavy sideboard bearing floral displays and a grand candelabra, and the piano around which gipsy fiddlers congregate on late-night incursions all remain. In spirit it remains precisely as it was - the parlour of an educated Warsaw household in the late Seventies, not long before Ewa and her husband, Kaz, fled General Jaruzelski's Poland, in which customers are treated more as cherished friends. Trained as both a pharmacologist and an opera singer (she burst sporadically into an operatic version of Walking in the Air, to applause, and offered a range of medications for a sore neck), this is as talented a front-of-house operator as I have met, and therein is the heart of the appeal of what is by any standards a magnificent restaurant. That, and the crazy, crazy prices. My sense is that she takes the earth-mother shtick too far in charging a preposterous £16.50 (unchanged for seven years) for a three-course menu laden with expensive ingredients. The quietude of the room can only be down to an unprepossessing location on the edge of Shepherd's Bush market (which Michael Winner owned long ago) and the council's vindictiveness in making it impossible to park lawfully anywhere closer than Gdansk before 8.30pm. Nowhere else in London could you eat half as well, or half as much, for the money: nowhere that comes to mind, anyway. Cabanos with marinated wild mushrooms (MARTIN POPE) Freshly baked rye bread with butter and pork pâté gave way to a plate of those kabanos, served aflame with a beetroot sauce, mustards and pickled cucumbers. Eschewing the hunter stew and smoked salmon with blinis, we went for a pair of classic soups: a garlicky white borscht, here curiously if endearingly spelt "borsteh," with country sausage, and the classic intense, sharp, clean-tasting beetrooty red version laden with pierogi (dumplings) that would be one of my Desert Island soups. The music would only have appealed to admirers of Cliff Richards's late oeuvre. But there is no pleasure in this life without pain, and enduring Mistletoe and Wine seemed a tolerable quid pro quo for a huge portion of succulent roast goose, sprinkled with red berries, with potatoes roasted in goose fat and Polish cabbage with apple and caraway seeds. Half a pheasant, also roasted and served with berries, was juicy and as delicious. Apple Charlotte and rum-filled pancakes, and vanilla cheesecake, were both predictably calorific and delicious; and we finished with fresh fruit, coffee and a shot of the vodka which used to be on the house in more profitable days, and will be once again for anyone who mentions being a Telegraph reader and adoring this page more than their own children. Duck a la Polonaise (MARTIN POPE) Eastern European stodge, even of this quality, will never be to all tastes. But my old enemy-turned-friend had sound instincts (and was not widely known as easy to please), and he awarded The Patio the title of Best Value Restaurant in his Winner's Dinners book for three consecutive years. What he loved about The Patio remains no less lovable today. For its honesty, authenticity, warmth and devotion to its customers, this is the Platonic ideal of the great neighbourhood restaurant. 5 Goldhawk Road, London W12 8QQ; 020 8743 5194; Patio London. Three-course set menu: £16.90. English-style" menu also available READ:Matthew Norman's 22 favourite restaurants READ: Kayal, Leicester, restaurant review