Charlotte Street Hotel and Zilli Fish: Two reliable picks for mid-town catching up

It was a predictably busy pre-holiday week, spent trying to wrap up things at work, sort passports, pack and get the house tidy for departure. Surely I am not the only person whose mother taught her to clean obsessively before leaving on vacation, so that if you died while away people would not think you were a bad housekeeper? I was a bit more worried about my staff feeling that I'd abandoned them with a disorganised pile of problems. I got both handover notes and house in a tidy order, so it was victory on all fronts.

I even managed to squeeze in a couple of long-planned and much needed catch ups with people in London, with generous lashings of fine food and conversation that got me in the mood for the upcoming holiday.

First to the Charlotte Street Hotel for lunch. This is a trendy staple in North Soho, always popular with the media and creative communities. It's a boutique hotel with a fashionable bar and an elegant, modern dining room. On a beautiful, sunny day, the doors across the front open to the street, giving the whole place a marvellously Southern, Continental appeal. In addition to a social catch up, this was also a serious business lunch with some conversation that needed to happen. And here Charlotte Street scores particularly high. Tables spread with enough distance to give you a bit of privacy, acoustics that facilitate conversation and a staff that's attentive enough to take care of your needs promptly, then backs off to allow you your space until they're called for.

The menu is your standard continental European mix, with a broad range of meats and vegetables in preparations drawn from France, Italy and further afield. I had a perfectly prepared slice of sea trout, crispy on the outside, delicate and flaky on the inside. Dessert was a wicked triple chocolate pleasure: a white chocolate mousse studded with bits of dark chocolate bownie, decorated with wings of chocolate praline. Absolutely worth the resolution to skip dinner that night in order to allow myself the indulgence.

The next night, on to Zilli Fish for a gossipy dinner with some girls from work. Another Soho staple, this one's a bit further South: just above Piccadilly Circus on Brewer Street, so fantastically located for meeting up with people who commute from a variety of train stations ringing town. Chef Owner Aldo Zilli is one of London's score of culinary TV stars, which did give me some hesitation as I booked the table. He is more famous for being famous than he is for his food.

I needn't have worried. By mid-main course this had landed near the top of my favourite spots for meeting up with friends. The menu is resolutely, authentically Italian and, as the name implies, almost exclusively seafood. The service is just as properly Italian, with a jovial bunch of doe-eyed youths from the old country not only providing service, but recommendations. Steering us to the best bits of the menu, recommending wine, not batting an eyelid when my friend with the curious taste in dessert wine quaffed that tipple throughout her main meal, instantly and without question replacing a main dish deemed too spicy with another option without charge, plying us with copious amounts of complimentary limoncello at the evening's end. Yes, it would have been exactly like an evening in Tuscany if the view out the open French doors had revealed a Renaissance castle and some swaying pines instead of the slightly seedy Georgian townhouses of Soho.

My carpaccio of swordfish with a generous pile of balsamic-dressed rocket was both an excellent recommendation from the waiter and innocent enough to hardly count on Weight Watchers. Which was my excuse for diving in to the house special: spaghetti with lobster. This is a simple, classic dish. And as so many are, it's often done badly. This was absolutely perfect. Spaghetti exactly al dente, a light sauce the perfect distillation of high summer tomatoes, the acidic sharpness of which meant that you could consume all those lucious pieces of lobster without feeling that everything was "too rich". The portion size was remarkably abundant for London; a magnificent twirl of pasta, generously studded with seafood in an impressive mound atop half a lobster carcass. At about double the size of what most restaurants would serve, and quadruple an acceptable dieter's portion, I should have felt both ill and wracked with guilt when I consumed the whole thing. Sadly, this was one of those times when the Sicilian DNA overpowered Weight Watchers discipline. All I felt was a remarkable sense of contentment and the need for a double espresso.