Yet both were beautifully cooked and both worked well with the bits and pieces glazed shallots and beetroots in the case of the

Yet both were beautifully cooked, and both worked well with the bits and pieces (glazed shallots and beetroots in the case of the lamb, celeriac ravioli for the duck) that accompanied them.Desserts, washed down with a couple of glasses of fresh, sweet Loire (Coteau du Layon) from a decent, workaday wine list, were unusually good. It’s right up there with the wheel, the electric light bulb and Jaffa Cakes.
Good promoters will rotate the DJ line-up, change the interior aesthetic and dream up exciting theme nights to keep the punters coming. Vapour ‘98 may not be affiliated to a super club or boast a horde of big names, but it promises some of the freshest sounds around

The club tour is one of the greatest inventions known to man. We left, moreover, with the bounce that comes from a clean conscience.

“We would like to thank you,” says a small note on the bottom f the menu, “for your vital contribution to our training.” You’re very welcomeThe Apprentice, 31 Shad Thames, London, SE1 (0171-357-8442); all major cards; closed weekends; The Vincent Room, Westminster College, Vincent Square, London SW1 (0171-828-1222, ex 284), Mastercard and Visa; three-course lunch with coffee pounds 9.50, Mon-Fri, Dinner Tues and Thurs.. At the end, we agreed that we had eaten a good, and, at pounds 66 for two, a good-value meal. A plate of sorbets managed to capture the tangy essence of raspberry, mango and passion fruit, and a hot chocolate sponge turned out, sure enough, to be hot, but also unexpectedly rich and bitter. Well, maybe with a little vin santo and cantuccini to follow, but I’ll still pass on the main course. In my early days as a cook, such was my fondness for gnocchi and reluctance to make them that I tried all manner of short-cuts, including buying them readymade. Were they even half as good as shop-bought fresh pasta, I think I should have settled for them, but the bullets that come out of vac-pacs are unrecognisable. They could almost be forgiven their lousy texture if they tasted like real gnocchi, instead of a concoction of scarcely edible chemicals.
Unfortunately, divine gnocchi do not come in packets.

The only way is to shut yourself into the kitchen, take the phone off the hook, pour yourself a glass of wine, turn on the radio, roll up your sleeves, and prepare to return to the childhood nirvana of making and shaping.They’re not that painful to make – the single most important thing being the dryness of the dough. Not as tough as pastry, it should feel more like a sticky bread dough. The difficulty comes if it is too sticky, but this depends on the type. As Anna Del Conte points out in her seminal Gastronomy of Italy, there are any number of variations. She includes “gnocchi alla cadorina” from Veneto, enriched with butter and smoked ricotta, also “gnocchi di zucca”, with pumpkin, spices and, sometimes, amaretti, doused with butter scented with rosemary and garlic. Then there are gnocchi made with polenta, gnocchi made with rice, and the extraordinary dumplings of Venezia Giulia, which are large enough to enfold a prune within.But all this is advanced gnocchi. For me, they come in the pale orange of pumpkin (although I prefer the concentrated sweetness of butternut squash), scattered with sage leaves that have turned crisp from a brief frying in butter.

I also like the restrained, creamy white of ricotta and potato, and the green of spinach and herbs such as parsley and marjoram, sometimes layered with fontina and a sprinkling of Parmesan before being baked like a gratin in the oven or sharpened with a smudge of pesto sauce.The forming of each little gnocco is something of an art. Effecting the grooves on their surface which allow the sauce to cling is the sort of thing Italian children pick up from grandma. To follow Anna del Conte’s recommendation, you should “take a fork and hold it with the prongs resting on the work surface at an angle of about 45 degrees. Take each piece of dough, dust it with flour, press it lightly with the thumb of your other hand against the inner curve of the prongs and, with a quick downwards movement, flip it towards the end of the prongs. The gnocchi should be concave on the thumb side, and convex with ridges on the fork side.”Mine simply emerged squashed and sad. To press the lines of a fork against its surface as it lies on the workbench is as close as I can offer to a solution for anyone as butter-fingered as myself. You don’t get the concave-convex curves that are a gnocco’s birthright, but you still get a fine little dumpling with grooves along its length.