Capital is that strange beast, a Michelin starred restaurant within an hotel. Normally when you see this arrangement it is the restaurant hiding in the skirt folds of the hotel. With Capital, both the “mother ship” and the restaurant are so discrete you could easily miss them. We went simply because Heston Blumenthal's new pace round the corner nestling in the Mandarin Hotel's silken décolletage was booked out and we were looking for a lunch to remember without a booking.

We were also jean clad. Unlike any number of starred establishments this was absolutely no problem. They had a table (it was a quiet Saturday lunch time) and as far as I could tell were not remotely phased by my weekend stubble, jeans and T shirt. This isn’t something that you can say of some so-called fine dining restaurants.

The restaurant is really just a small dining room with I would guess maybe 15-20 tables and a small bar area. The atmosphere at lunch time was somewhat compromised by the clientele: a private banker trying to sell deranged investment products to a Chinese gentleman through an interpreter. He seemed to think that everyone needed his ill considered advice. I’d imagine that when full this kind of self aggrandisement would be drowned out by the general hubbub of conversation.

We ordered from the set lunch menu: £29.50 for three courses per person. Starters were either unchallenging (Waldorf salad twisted a bit and beautifully presented or a Lobster bisque) or out on the end of the spectrum (Snail vol-au-vents). I had the snails, my wife the twisted salad. She was perplexed by the salad, not recognising it as anything Waldorf like but generally liking it despite the strange disks of maybe turnip that it nestled upon. My snail vol-au-vent was instantly recognisable as a distant relative of Mr Blumenthal’s famous snail porridge: It had the same idea of layers of taste and texture, acidic salad, meaty molluscs and in this case replacing the risotto with a pastry case. It was very tasty… More