Nearly seven years have passed – though it hardly seems possible to me – since I enthusiastically reviewed the Italian restaurant Cibo! shortly after its opening in premises in South Parade once occupied by the Co-op. Odd name, South Parade, incidentally, since it lies well north of North Parade. This has to do with the Civil War. As the invaluable (if sometimes implausible) Wikipedia puts it: “When Charles I was besieged by Oliver Cromwell at Oxford, North Parade was the location of the Royalist northern front, whereas South Parade was the Roundhead southern front during the siege of Oxford.” So now you know . . .

Casting an eye over my old review, I had another surprise in noting how little prices had risen over the period. The house white, Graspello di Veneto, for instance, which still lives up to the description “a light honest wine”, was £9.60 in 2002, and is £11.95 now. I am unsure if this is thanks to the good financial management of Gordon Brown, or to the restraint of Cibo!’s owners Matthew Lebus and Antony Di Pinto.

As for the grappa I am afraid I can make no comparison. The shots enjoyed on the first visit came courtesy of Antony’s dad, Mario – he used to run a restaurant that still bears his name in Cowley Road – who sent them across from an adjacent table where he happened to be eating. This time, the glass of grappa Amarone (considered “the king of grappas”) set me back a far from unreasonable £3.95.

But enough of the digestif: let’s start at the very beginning, as Maria sings in The Sound of Music – a show very different from the one we had been watching up (down?) the road at North Wall. This was John Ford’s blood-drenched tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. We noticed most of the cast and crew had arrived at the newly renovated Cibo! in our wake: two hours of incest and slaughter does so revive the appetite!

The closing image of a human (I suppose here that would have been pig’s) heart held aloft on a dagger had rather put me off meat for the present. I chose to start, then, with antipasto gardiniera, which brought generous quantities of sun-dried tomatoes, olives, green and black, and chunks of artichoke hearts and grilled aubergine and courgette. This was all wolfed with pleasure, though I was rather surprised not to be offered bread (and to have to pay a further £2.95 a time for small baskets of focaccia, one with garlic, the other with rosemary).

Rosemarie’s starter, selected from the hot antipasti section of the menu, was cozze marinara – a bowl of melt-in-the-mouth fresh mussels cooked in lemon, wine, garlic and parsley. Other ‘fishy’ starters included battered squid rings, either alone or in the company of battered prawns, octopus and whitebait, and thinly sliced cooked octopus with pink peppercorn dressing. The styling of this last as ‘carpaccio’ – as cooked fish and meat of this sort so often is these days – puzzled me, since I thought the expression applied only to raw ingredients. Still, I am not Italian (or even an Italian speaker) and this is an Italian restaurant.

I wondered about one of the many excellent sounding (and looking) pizzas as my main course, but in the end gave in to the temptation of the whole sea bass. This was cooked on the charcoal grill (crisp skin and succulent flesh) and served with salsa verde and a well-dressed side salad. I also enjoyed a side order of spinach cooked with sage and butter and topped with parmesan.

Rosemarie had fettucine with meatballs in tomato sauce. She thought it OK, but said she would have preferred it if the meatballs had not tasted as if they had been made from minced cold meat. They reminded her of the Monday rissoles all of our age remember from childhood.

There was no ‘chocolate nemesis’ – a gooey home-made tort – at that time, of course – or easy availability (dolcelatte, apart) of any of the four cheeses – two hard, two soft – I ordered with biscuits to complete this enjoyable meal.

So who said they were ‘the good old days’?