Food: Hampstead grief

It is an old London fairytale that there are no good restaurants in Hampstead. When the good restaurants were being handed out, Hampstead was ignored, betrayed, disgraced — given only a Carluccio’s, a Café Rouge and a quite disgusting Chinese place that has a ridiculous water feature and its own bridge. This is the story, anyway, as told to frightened children in north-west London.

I thought I would try to break the spell, and find a restaurant worth paying for, so I do not have to go to Camden and fight my way through fetish boots and tall angry men who smell. There may be one, it is said — just one restaurant in Hampstead that passes. The Villa Bianca. It is an Italian restaurant that looks like a white Dickensian shop on a charming paved lane. This is fancy-schmancy Hampstead, sold to American expats as the British countryside, but near enough to Heathrow airport for them to return to America and ruin lives there too.