Staff here are really friendly - genuinely enthusiastic about the food and ingredients. The food in general is really good - mozzarella here is amazing, a nice little touch is that if you order the truffle pasta, they take the whole box of truffle and shave it onto your food in front of you. Prices are standard London.

I normally round off my reviews with mention of the final bill involved, but feel a need to tell you sooner that a 3-course meal for two with wine, coffee and digestifs came in at just under £130 (service included). Fortunately, money was no object – and a good thing too as not one item on the menu appeared to be under £7 (except for bread at £1.75 per portion).

Manicomio is widely known for its remarkably poor and patchy service, but we obviously picked a perfect night for attentiveness as all our dishes flowed with a smooth professional nuance; though we did wonder if it had something to do with the price we were prepared to pay for eating there.

Foregoing the house speciality of buffalo mozzarella with caponata (a Sicilian relish of fried eggplants, tomatoes, celery, onion and olives), we chose antipasti of endive and fig salad with a gorgonzola dressing and a smoked tuna salad with French beans and sundried tomato, sopping up the oily, creamy juices with fistfuls of focaccia.

As per usual, there was no way I was going to resist a main course of grilled lamb cutlets with rösti (fried grated-potato cakes) and wild mushrooms – and a few mouthfuls of my friend's veal shank ravioli with carrot and saffron didn’t go amiss with an accompaniment of mixed salad leaves on the side.

We noticed a fishy prevalence of prawns, squid, bream, tuna, hake, cuttlefish and clams on the main course menu and found this a hilarious consequence of dining in ChelSEA where, of course, the sea is nowhere to be found. Still, some diners around us seemed to be tucking into their dishes with wholesome abandon.

My already sated co-diner was easily persuaded to share my portion of vanilla and white peach cheesecake and, draining a bottle of 2005 Merlot, double espressos and snifters of Poire William left us a pair of well-served customers indeed.

The restaurant’s name, by the way, comes from the Italian for “madhouse”: its location stands on the site of what was once our capital’s royal military asylum.

I normally round off my reviews with mention of the final bill involved, but feel a need to tell you sooner that a 3-course meal for two with wine, coffee and digestifs came in at just under £130 (service included). Fortunately, money was no object – and a good thing too as not one item on the menu appeared to be under £7 (except for bread at £1.75 per portion).

Manicomio is widely known for its remarkably poor and patchy service, but we obviously picked a perfect night for attentiveness as all our dishes flowed with a smooth professional nuance; though we did wonder if it had something to do with the price we were prepared to pay for eating there.

Foregoing the house speciality of buffalo mozzarella with caponata (a Sicilian relish of fried eggplants, tomatoes, celery, onion and olives), we chose antipasti of endive and fig salad with a gorgonzola dressing and a smoked tuna salad with French beans and sundried tomato, sopping up the oily, creamy juices with fistfuls of focaccia.

As per usual, there was no way I was going to resist a main course of grilled lamb cutlets with rösti (fried grated-potato cakes) and wild mushrooms – and a few mouthfuls of my friend's veal shank ravioli with carrot and saffron didn’t go amiss with an accompaniment of mixed salad leaves on the side.

We noticed a fishy prevalence of prawns, squid, bream, tuna, hake, cuttlefish and clams on the main course menu and found this a hilarious consequence of dining in ChelSEA where, of course, the sea is nowhere to be found. Still, some diners around us seemed to be tucking into their dishes with wholesome abandon.

My already sated co-diner was easily persuaded to share my portion of vanilla and white peach cheesecake and, draining a bottle of 2005 Merlot, double espressos and snifters of Poire William left us a pair of well-served customers indeed.

The restaurant’s name, by the way, comes from the Italian for “madhouse”: its location stands on the site of what was once our capital’s royal military asylum.