Eating Out: Prodigious talent ; The Ledbury's head chef Brett Graham may be very young at just 26, but his cooking demonstrates an accomplished maturity far beyond his tender years: [First Edition]

The first thing served at The Ledbury is a small dish of tomato tea jelly, tuna and avocado pure. It is pure joy in the mouth, the quivering sea of clear gel set around a heart of creamy avocado, topped with a tiny dice of jewel-like tuna and The World's Smallest Croutons, as crunchy as sugar crystals. It's a very good start but, then, Brett Graham, the 26-year-old chef, knows all about getting off to a very good start.

When I first met him in 1999, Graham was a 19-year-old cooking at Sydney's highly acclaimed Banc restaurant under Matthew Kemp, himself a brilliant young chef who had cooked with Phil Howard at The Square in Mayfair. Graham's passion and commitment to his craft were even then so bleeding obvious that he walked off with that year's prestigious Josephine Pignolet Award as Sydney's best young chef. Soon afterwards, he moved to London to work at The Square himself. Made sous chef at 23, he was named the 2002 British Young Chef of the Year by the Restaurant Association.

Three years later, backed by Howard and The Square's co-owner Nigel Platts- Martin, Graham takes on his first head chef post at what used to be the brunch-babes' Dakota in deepest Notting Hill. It is a dream of an opportunity. The dining-room is gorgeous, pleasingly proportioned, elegantly tall and solidly built, with a good...