Bruno's Italian knockout

Eyebrows were raised when restaurateur Oliver Peyton announced in September that his company, Gruppo, would be opening two new Italian restaurants in London's Knightsbridge under the watchful eye of Bruno Loubet. Not that the culinary ability of Loubet, the company's training and development chef for the past two years, was doubted. But a Frenchman cooking Italian food? A novelty, a risk even, it was muttered.

Loubet himself, in his quiet way, is impatient with such misgivings. "It's stupid to say you can't cook Italian food if you're not from Italy. Marco Pierre White, a three-Michelin-star chef, is an Englishman cooking French food. Gordon Ramsay, he's got two Michelin stars and is probably on his way to a third - he's Scottish, doing what is essentially French food. And at the end of the day, there is far more in common between Italian and French cooking than between British and French cooking.

"The food in the south of France, for instance, is very similar to that on the Ligurian coast in Italy. You'll find some dishes are exactly the same - the only difference sometimes is the quality or quantity of olives or herbs used, or one vegetable may be preferred to another."

He has a point. Tomatoes, olives, basil, rosemary, oregano, aubergine - all ingredients immediately associated with Italy - are also used as a matter of course in French cooking. Even those that are inextricably linked with France, such as foie gras and truffles, have a home in north Italian dishes. "The only produce I can think of that you get in Italy but not France is mozzarella and mostarda di Cremona - candied fruit in mustard syrup traditionally served with cold meats," Loubet says.

It is not surprising that the countries have so much in common on the culinary front. Both have Mediterranean coasts, both have rich, dairy-based agricultural traditions. Moreover, as Loubet points out, 400 years ago an Italian princess, Catherine de Medici, married in to the French royal family and transplanted a flavour of her native Florence on to French soil. "She brought over all her own chefs and French haute cuisine stems from her court," he explains.

So, when Peyton asked him a year ago whether he would be interested in becoming head chef at the 110-seat fine-dining restaurant, Isola, and its 125-seat sister eaterie Osteria d'Isola scheduled for a November 1999 opening, it seemed natural to Loubet to accept the challenge. "To me what I am doing is just evolution, normal evolution," says the chef who first captured public attention 10 years ago as head chef at London's Four Seasons hotel, following a stint with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons. "Why should I always do what everybody expects me to do? I like to surprise."

Loubet's brief was to create a sophisticated upmarket menu for Isola, and a more family-orientated, less formal eating experience for Osteria. In order to do this with legitimate culinary authority, he has spent the past year immersing himself in Italian food, reading specialised books and, on four occasions, touring Italy with Peyton to get a feel for the country's indigenous cooking. The result of all this concentrated study is a range of dishes with a genuine Italian feel, touched here and there with a Gallic accent.

That accent, acquired through 23 years cooking his native cuisine, is apparent in costarda di cipolle bianche, fonduta di formaggio e tartufi neri (creamed white onions with melted cheese and fresh black truffle) offered as a starter on the Isola menu. Its origins lie in a dish Loubet came across on one of his Italian jaunts in Florence's famous Vineria Cibreo-Cibreino restaurant - a vegetable flan served with a peppery tomato sauce. Searching for a fresh way to serve truffle in England, Loubet matched his memory of the Florence costarda with his knowledge of a classic French soubise to produce his own interpretation of the Italian flan.

"I wanted something creamy, because of course truffle goes very well with cream, thought about onions and came up with the idea of making a little flan of onions with raw truffle inside. That way you have all the texture and flavour of the truffle instead of [diluting it by] cooking it first. And now it seems to be the dish that everybody goes for or is talking about," explains Loubet, relaxing amid the vibrant red banquettes and gleaming chrome pillars in Isola.

The search for new ways of using popular Italian ingredients has also led him to incorporate squid ink, not in a risotto nero, but in a stew of poached hake. Tournedos of hake are poached in milk flavoured with bay leaf, peppercorns and cloves before being served on crushed new potatoes seasoned with olive oil, chopped olives and spring onions. The fish is topped with puntarelle, a bitter salad leaf from Bologna, and accompanied by a sauce made from squid ink, wine, braised octopus and fish remains. "This gives everything a real sea flavour - it's not only black and pretty, it tastes just like the sea," says Loubet.

Purists may carp at the French flair that Loubet brings to his take on Italian cuisine, but the eating public has no such qualms. Already Isola and Osteria buzz with Italian diners, making up as much as 50% of the custom in Isola. "I think it's because I'm not bound by a regional style of cooking. I keep the line but am free to take ideas from everywhere. Sometimes, Italian chefs stick to their traditional regions too much," he says.

He speculates, too, that journalists may be too rigid in their expectation of what an Italian restaurant should serve. "They have their own ideas on what they think Italian cooking is. The only thing that really hurts is that people put me in a category - it makes life easy. Some journalists want me to be in a small restaurant with ‘Bruno's' above the door, doing 50 covers. That's great and very nice but at the end of the day thereality is that I have a wife and three children. People have to understand that I've worked nearly 25 years of my life in the kitchen doing up to 18 hours a day, six days a week and I don't want that any more. I have a life you know."

Loubet speaks without bitterness but from experience, having opened his own restaurant, Bistrot Bruno, in London's Soho with the backing of Pierre and Kathleen Condou to great acclaim in 1993. Two years later, at the height of its success, the partnership opened a second restaurant, Regent Street's L'Odéon, but Loubet pulled out in 1997, briefly taking consultancy work before teaming up with Peyton in January 1998.

So, the fact that his Italian customers recognise his food at Isola as the genuine article, rather than a populist attempt to cash in on the British dining public's fondness for Italian cuisine, is of great satisfaction to Loubet. It vindicates the path he has chosen for himself. And, indeed, he and Peyton have gone to great lengths to offer an authentic dining experience with much of the produce used in his dishes sourced directly from Italy - Bologna in particular being a rich source of cured meats.

Loubet is clearly comfortable cooking Italian food. The attributes - still discernible - that he showed when he was cooking in a French vein fit the relaxed Italian way of dining: maximising the natural textures and flavours of any given produce; a lack of pretension; an emphasis on sociable food.

Describing his reasons for a longstanding boycott of savoury farces, Loubet provides a neat summary of his food philosophy. "It's not a natural way to present food. I believe you should preserve the natural aspect of things. Why spoil a salmon, for instance, by processing it in to a mousse, hiding its real texture? Why not take it and cook it normally and keep its texture flaky and moist? I'm an honest person; my cooking is the same."

For the time being, that cooking is available to anyone eating in Isola where Loubet is behind the stove on a daily basis. However, in time, he hopes to scale down the hours he spends in the kitchen and hand over some of the day-to-day running of the restaurant to his two senior sous chefs, Darren Templeman and David Hawksworth, and one junior sous chef, Franck Jeandon. They already take turns to head up the Osteria brigade.

The extra leisure time will enable Loubet not only to catch up on sleep, but also to relax in his garden and allotment. But it is not herbs or vegetables that will be on his mind, but the inhabitants of his snail farm."I haven't been in my garden for four weeks - the snails will be out of Jurassic Park next time I get out there," he jokes. And the snails had better watch out. Loubet is planning a particularly Gallic Christmas meal.