Le Relais De Venise l'entrecote

Marylebone Lane, London. Two courses £19

Le Relais De Venise comes to you straight from the Henry T Ford school of choice: you can have any dish you like as long as it's steak and chips, or frites, as the purveyors of this fanatically Francophile joint would no doubt prefer. Everything from the mirrored walls to the cute banquette seating seems to have been cloned from a Parisian brasserie, so it's not a surprise to find that l'Entrecote's sister restaurant has resided in the French capital since the late 1950s. Both places allegedly measure the length of the chips to the nearest millimetre, but are not quite particular enough to take bookings.

We arrive early evening. There is of course a queue: do you join the back, knowing full well most of the diners are likely to have arrived only moments before; or do you hole up in a local boozer and wait for the first seating to clear, running the risk of more hungry diners arriving in the meantime? We opt for the latter, and could have done with something a little more substantial than the standard starter of green salad with walnuts, if nothing else to soak up the booze.

But the steak-frites is the main event, and very eventful it is too. The texture of the crunchy, fluffy chips marries so well with the juicy sirloin, smothered in its "secret sauce", that the lack of menu feels a blessing. These are steak-frites specialists—their skills distilled until the combined trinity of ingredients is vastly superior to its constituent parts. What's in the sauce? Butter, definitely; some herbs, probably. But when it tastes this good, who cares what's in it? The waitress returns with seconds and we practically mug her.