Good, no frills, best of British place to go for breakfast, or a quick snack, but not really a place that is going to challenge the many epicurean delights in Marylebone as top dog. The food (and beer and cider) majors on good, fresh British food, and they even have the wonderful British sparker, Nyetimber, at a mere £39 a bottle. Forget the house champagne (at twice the price), this is a steal.

Breakfasts are very good; just the right amount of bacon in good fresh bread for the bacon sarnie (although it's a shame that they don't run to crusty rolls), marmite toasts, kippers etc. These are available throughout the day, and come with fresh fruit juices and good coffee.

For more substantial offerings, there is always a daily roast and a pie of the day, but the star is the properly roasted chicken, either leg or breast, served with chips and a lovely garlicy mayonnaise. A good roast chicken and chips is hard to beat: too many soggy “chicken in a basket” affairs at dodgy pubs offering “good food and fine wine” (for which read pre-prepared garbage and Australian shiraz) have done the humble roast chicken a huge diservice. Canteen's offering is remenisent of what I remember (probably way too fondly for what they actually were) of poulet et frites, found at some tiny relais routiers after five hours in the back of dad's cortina on the way down to the south of France; a welcome break from arguing with my two siblings.

Service is fine, if a little slow, and the atmosphere is never really buzzing, but the food is good, the drinks too, and none of it is expensive.

A moral dilemma: is it ethical for a restaurant to include on its wine list the prices that you'd pay at its competitors' pads? Does it make it any easier to take if the person most prodded is Gordon Ramsay?

I know one restauranteur who thinks it is a poor show. Me? I can see both sides: sure, it is nice to know that the Haut Brion is a quarter of the price here than at Marcus Waring, but then the food isn't really a quarter as good, so what does the comparison show? Add to this the fact that none of the wines appear to be cheaper anywhere else (did you check out the Union Cafe Bob?) and a fear that our friendly Bob is merely being mischievous. Now, were he to put the wholesale prices that the wines were bought at, that would be interesting.

And the wine list is very interesting. Along with the said HB (£362 if you must ask) there is a terrific selection by the glass, including the fine Grand-Puy-Ducasse and even the glorious Yquem '96, in both 100cl and a “tasting” size of 50cl. Genius. In fact, why do you need then to put down your fellow restaurants? Man-up Bob; you have a great wine list, don't knock others.

The room itself is, I think, supposed to be reminiscent of grand station cafes from the time of steam trains, sort of up-market American diner, with pink waistcoated boys and turquoise besuited girls. I'm afraid, to me it looked like I'd imagine the waiting room at a high class brothel would.

The menu is all day and mixes French and Russian, with British bits thrown in, so you get caviar and vodka shots, next to onglet, next to cream teas. All a bit confusing, but then Russia and France have a long culinary history; we have, if legend is to be believed, Napoleon's Russian troops in Montmartre to thank for the word “bistro”.

There are nice touches – a button to press for champagne, a plug for the toaster that comes with afternoon tea, that sort of thing. But its all a bit gloomy on a bright summer's afternoon.

The food was perfectly adequate, but didn't really illuminate the gloom. The pickled herring with beetroot was a lovely colourful palate and the potted prawns were perfectly serviceable. This dish started well, with the dressing on the watercress salad being lovely. The prawns themselves came in a creamy, anchovy infused binding, rather than the more traditional clarified butter. Fine as it was, although a bit salty, a sensation heightened by the toast that accompanied it, which was itself highly salted. I know the latest report on whether salt is good for you or not has said go for it, but there is a limit. This went beyond that limit.

Mains too were fine: the chicken Kiev a little let down by not enough garlicky butter (what else is the point of the dish?), but the veal Holstein flat, breaded and with a fried quail's egg mounting it very pleasant indeed.

We skipped deserts and instead spent the money on a thimbleful sized glass of Yquem. A glorious honey marmalade of a wine, that needed nothing plated to accompany it.

So go for the food if you must, but stay for the wine and Bob, come on, tell us how much you paid for them. You tell us how much we have to pay you, so it seems only fair.

You really do not want to go here with a hangover. The assault on the eyes would drive you hurtling down the narrow, barely lit, health and safety defying, spiral staircase to the loos. Only for the senses once again to be overwhelmed by weaver birds’ nests, frogs and wooden statues of naked pygmies surrounding the porcelain.

Yes, the place is decorated in what might be termed an idiosyncratic manner. Very idiosyncratic. If the Indonesian masks next to the fairy lights posing as flowers don’t get you, the Korean Karaoke-like renditions of Beetles hits will.

The food too could be described as challenging. Think crickets and love bugs, crunchy in a green salad. Think kangaroo spiced with “21 spices from Yemen”, that well known home of Skippy and his fellow marsupials. Think a gnu stroganoff. Think zebra.

It isn’t all odd for oddness sake: the wine list (housed in what might have been a canopic jar) has a 1961 Petrus (at nearly eight grand) sitting next nothing else that gets past a ton. OK, that is odd. But there is a main course of spiced Mexican belly pork. It comes in a Tom Yum broth. OK, that is odd too.

In fact, what am I talking about; it is all odd.

Many years ago I went to a restaurant in Nairobi that served barbecue skewers, churrasco like, of antelope, zebra, giraffe etc. Alongside this, it had similar skewers of lamb and beef. Having tried them all, it is easy to see why we eat far more lamb and beef in this country than zebra.

So go and try kangaroo and crocodile, they will no doubt be the best of their kind that you will try in this country. Thereafter, stick to lamb and beef, which just taste better.

There is a bar, in Menlo Park, they call the British Bankers Club (which is sort of where this Animals riff stops scanning); last time I was there, I was the only Brit, I’m not a banker and it wasn’t really a club.

The Guinea Grill, on the other hand, could be the home of the fabled BBC. The room is wood lined, the staff wear white aprons and the food is solid, boarding school grub. Oh, and almost everyone dinning there was in a pin-stripped blue, grey or blue-grey suit. And male.

Our waiter was what I believe is technically known as a “character”. The character he most resembled physically was Mr Potatohead, but with an Italian accent. He needed a comedy pepper grinder, and his image would be complete.

Starters were fine: asparagus, crayfish crab cocktail and smoked salmon, but the mains, ah; the mains. Steak. One is introduced to the steak at reception. And to the barbecue grill, upon which it will be transformed. Proper bone in rib, seared as requested; a bit of watercress; some chips; some mustard; and peas. Lovely. Or pie: thin, flaky, larded crust; juicy beef; rich unctuous gravy; and a Blackadder style frilly collar.

Comfort food done to the highest standard.

The search for the best steak in London continues: it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

We arrived early, and were ushered into a gentleman’s club of a bar, all mahogany, leather and low lighting. The (heavy) bar seats are, as the friendly barman cheerfully told, extremely comfortable. And the cocktails are extremely good. The list is long, but the barmen happy to make suggestions based on your likes. This is a very fine bar, with very fine barmen, making very fine cocktails.

When our table became available, we were escorted from the cosiness of the bar to the cavern of the dining room, all bare bricks and high ceilings. We were post-theatre so wanted merely a main. Fine, but this, we were told, would be thirty minutes. Fair enough, although how a medium-rare steak takes more than 15-20 minutes I am unsure. By this stage of the evening, all the sensibly sized sharing steaks had gone, and we were left with the smallest: a 1.1kg rib-eye, so maybe 30 minutes at a squeeze.

40 minutes later, our friendly waiter (think Toby from In the Loop) came back to tell us it would be eight more minutes. Nice and precise. 15 minutes later, another missive from the kitchen: one minute until we could tuck in. Ten minutes later, it arrived. Over an hour. For a medium-rare steak?

For this to work, the steak had better be the best piece ever, cooked to perfection. It wasn’t. The steak itself was a lovely piece, nicely marbled, thick and pink on the interior. It was also really greasy. Not juicy; greasy. There is a profound difference. So were the peas and lettuce (although, given that they seemed to have substituted mangetout for petit pois, that was the least of my concerns with the dish).

It wasn’t all bad – the chips were lovely. We did a comparative tasting between the triple cooked and the beef dripping. Both were greaseless, both fine examples of the fryer's art, but the triple cooked won hands down: cut thinner, they were crispy and precise. Alas, a fine £4 bag of chips doesn’t a £70 steak make. Yes. It is expensive. And the sauce is extra. You’re charging seventy notes for a steak and then you add insult to injury by charge a bottle for the béarnaise? Come on.

We spotted that our cocktails had been omitted from the bill and, having pointed this out to Toby, he was kind enough not to add them in, because management “loved us”. Nice touch, but I’m afraid the love is only going the one way.

Great bar but, if you want the steak, go early to get a cut and size you want, order ahead and take some Thirst Pockets. Just in case.

Friends, Marylebone, countrymen, lend me your ears! I come to bury Galvin, not to praise him. Unlike Marc Anthony, however, I am not being ironic; it really was the case that, on the showing of last evening, GBDL should be well and truly buried. To be fair, I have been here a number of times, and this is the only time that I have felt the evening to be anything other than very good. But I am reviewing last night, so what can I say; it wasn't a terribly good evening.

We were walk-ins, so had a seat in the middle of the room, by which the serving staff and diners pass every few seconds. It was this or outside on Baker Street, with its buses and other assorted road traffic passing every few seconds.

Things started fine; we were settled into seats, given menus, bread and water. So far, so good. Orders were taken. Again, looking good. Then it all started to unravel: how many times have I complained about wine arriving after the food? There is a set pattern to meals now: take a seat, order, wine arrives, food arrives, coffee, pay and leave. The restaurant wouldn’t like it if you reversed the latter two, so why or why do we get food that sits and waits for the wine to arrive? Come on guys, it isn’t that hard. Food goes with wine, wine goes with food. It works. Always has done, always will. Try harder.

You will have gathered that the wine didn’t arrive. The food did. Piping hot snails, drowning in garlic butter, crusted with parsley; and a thick veloute of broad beans with hard boiled egg. Hard boiled? Surely soft would have worked better. Never mind; both were pleasant, both work better with wine. So we asked. And then we asked the maitre d’. He brought the red. We had ordered a white to start. He brought it. Didn’t offer a sniff; just poured. He left.

Now it is nice of the restaurant to do wines by the carafe, but they: (a) shouldn’t sit around at the service area; and (b) should be served as any bottle would: it could be off. Let me at least give it a cursory olfactory test.

Worse was to come with the mains mind. First there was the wait. Having had the starters rushed to the table before the wine could be served, the mains it seems were being delayed. Maybe so that we finished the wine and had to order more. On arrival, the risotto was pleasing enough, even if the toms were cold, not having been sat in the warmth of the rice long enough. The brain dish, however, was just wrong. I like a nice veal brain, and the brains themselves were a delight: crispy on the outside, melting within. The trouble was they were swimming, nay engulfed in black butter; an oil slick of BP proportions, completely covering the mashed potato that fought like a seabird to escape from the injustice done to it. The black butter is there to enhance, to add to, not overwhelm the centrepiece: the brains.

We couldn’t face any more, so got the bill. Not cheap, not really cheerful. A shame really, as it can be such a great place, as previous visits have proved. Clearly, when it has an off night, Galvin Bistro De Luxe does it with the utmost Gallic flair.

Kiwis – check

Flat White – check

Bare brick walls and trendy art – check

Cool location – er, no.

Yes, all the classic combinations for an achingly hip and trendy, so cool it hurts coffee shop are present but, instead of being in Hoxton or Soho, it is in a Leather Lane. Home to a daily tat market that makes Petticoat Lane market look like Harrods.

The cool kids’ loss is the City’s gain. The coffee is seasonal, freshly roasted, ground in front of you and really rather good. Service is individual, with each cup/glass being lovingly created, so the wait is longer than at Starbucks. But hell, you get coffee here, not some hot, brown milk with shed-loads of syrup added to disguise the disgusting muck being served.

Food is croissant and muesli (organic and free range, a bien sur), lunch is bagels and the like and afternoons come with lemon drizzle cake and Pasteis de Nata.

Go. We need more coffee nerds like the founders: with any luck they’ll be taking over disused Starbucks and Costa Coffee venues soon.

There is little that I can say about Dinner by Heston Blumenthal that has not already been said many times more eloquently before. The bloggersphere is awash with praise and whole swathes of Amazonian rain forests have been desecrated to make the news- and magazine- paper onto which further adulation has been heaped. The restaurant deserves every word of praise. It is fabulous.

For those of you who want to know more, read on. If, however, you simply want to know whether it justifies the hype and is worth giving up your first born to secure a table, the answer is yes. Read no further.

For those still reading…

We arrived late for our already late booking, due to being caught in a kettle. This wasn’t some domestic appliance related incident, but rather that our perambulation down Piccadilly was blocked by the boys and girls in blue. It seems that a group of youths fancied a cup of tea in Fortnum & Masons. A fine choice; except that they preferred not to pay. Given their avowed anarchic tendencies, perhaps they adhered to the view that all proper tea is theft. The rozzers were out in force to help show them the error of their ways.

Arriving very late was a mere trifle to the charming front of house staff. Our coats were soon whisked away (an interesting aside here: most places have a sign saying that no responsibility for loss is accepted. Here, the envelope containing your coat check informs you that no responsibility will be taken if the article is valuable. Presumably, if it was a cheap coat, they would cough-up if nicked?). We were then shown through the bar (resplendent with absinth fountain) to the main event.

The room itself is impressive. You approach it by walking through a glass wine cellar and emerge into a light, high-ceilinged, airy space, with enormous chandeliers and an immense clock. On closer inspection, this is dial less and instead is the mechanism for an impressive looking spit, upon which turn pineapples.

Having only booked three months in advance, and for the uber trendy time of 10.30 p.m., we were not at all surprised that we didn’t get a seat by the open kitchen, instead being given pride of place next to a serving station. And service is good. Friendly, helpful, informative (the latter a prerequisite given the fare on offer), if a little quirky at times (how many times do you get food served before the wine? No, no, no – wrong. I digress).

For readers of a website like this, you’d have had to have been living on Mars not to have heard of Meat Fruit. A chicken liver mousse, coated in a mandarin jelly, presented as a mandarin and dating from 1500. I can report that it was every bit as good as reports (and expectation).

But here’s the rub: this was the only Hestonesque dish on the menu. It looked like a mandarin, but tasted of the most perfect chicken mousse. And mandarin. Sure there are odd ingredients (chicken oysters) and odd names (Salamagundy – well, that’s the chicken oysters actually) but, other than Meat Fruit, everything was what it seemed. Steak was steak (and came with chips) and rice was rice (and came in what, by any other name, was a risotto).

But where was the twist, the snail in the porridge?

Actually, that is the twist. This isn’t the Fat Duck. It isn’t even Fat Duck Light. It is a British restaurant serving British food. It is a culinary education. It is a V-sign to French: think that you invented confit duck? Think again: from 1630, I give you Powdered Duck. It is confit. It is a British recipe. At the same time as the French were in Dover pleading for help from the British against the Dutch, it seems that they were also nicking our recipe books (The Queen-like Closet by Hannah Wolley if you must know). Put that in your Gauloise and smoke it Frenchies.

To the hordes of septics who come to London, eat at Angus Steak Houses and Yeah Olde Fishie and Chippie Shoppe before moaning about that we can’t cook, I give you Turkey Pudding; a dish created nearly fifty years before the civil war that created your grating country. And in return, you gave us McDonalds and KFC. Gee; thanks.

The dishes themselves are great. The Salamagundy was fantastic: chicken oysters are my favourite part of the bird, and came with both a light horseradish cream and bone marrow. Two mighty big ticks. On to mains and still excellent: the spicy pigeon was gorgeous – just the right side of pink and just the right spicing, and the pork chop succulent and itself a little pink. Lovely. To finish, we had the tipsy cake with the roasted pineapples. Like the dishes that had gone before, absolutely top notch: a modern classic in the making (from 1810).

Forget the names on the dishes, this is what we commonly think of as French food, and isn’t. It is British. And it’s taken an earnest young man with odd glasses who just wants to make us dinner to show us how rich our culinary heritage truly is.

I love both Polpo and Polpetto, so was hardly likely to be entirely unbiased when it came to trying the third of the Russell Norman trilogy. And it is good. If anything, Spuntino is the best of the three so far.

Like P&P it specialises in small, sharing plates. It has that same distressed feel about it that P&P both have, with old school enamel plates, mismatched tumblers and bare brickwork and lights, but is much airier than either of the P's. It is the atmosphere that sets it apart though: it is much more fun, much more upbeat. There is country/blues (old Johnny Cash, early Elvis, Blind Boys of Alabama, that sort of thing) playing over the sound system. There were tourists looking wide eyed and out of place alongside Soho locals and somebody who looked like Joe Ninety in an M&S cardie, modalising with a size zero, both slurping down each other and the mac & cheese.

The no booking policy is going to grate. As is the service, which is relaxed to the point of forgetfulness. Being democratic, you get here and join the queue. You wait for a space (one table, otherwise a big U shaped bar, with place settings along it). Then you wait for the place setting of the departed person to be cleared (or, this being an American styled joint, the “deseated” person). Then you wait a bit more. Then you fend off some tourist trying to jump the queue. Then you just go and sit down in the place and let them clear it up for you. Not a problem for a late Saturday lunch, but at the height of a sitting, this could be bothersome.

That said, the waiting staff are uniformly friendly, having got that whole baggy trousered look, with vast arrays of underwear and tattoos on display, down perfectly. Now I am not averse to the odd tattoo (and some of these were not only odd, but must have been really quite painful to apply), but I could do without so many stripped jocks being shown: even the aprons were tied below the buttline.

The name Spuntino comes from the Italian for nibbles, and a spuntino of cayenne peppered popcorn was delivered with the water. Despite the name, however, the feel is very North American, with sliders (small buns, filled with “ground” meat) and grits, and the use of “zucchini” and “eggplant”, to describe courgettes and aubergines. Although I am not entirely sure that macaroni cheese could be described as quintessentially American.

The eggplant came in the form of chips, coated in a light batter and served with fennel yoghurt. They were lovely. Crispy coated, soft middles and complementary. Yum. Truffled egg toast is a nice thick slab of bread, hollowed out in the centre for a truffle infused egg to be dropped in and then covered in cheese. Heaven. We tried a slider too, a “ground” (nay minced) beef and bone marrow, which comes in a sweetish bun with pickles. The softshell crab was one I was a little worried about trying. Not that I don’t like softshell crab, quite the contrary: I love the crunchy little fellas, but had been underwhelmed by Polpotto’s version. This was much better: light batter and Tabasco mayonnaise, atop a crunchy fennel salad. Very yum, and extra Tabasco on the counter (along with Coleman’s mustard, Heinz ketchup and an American non-mustard called French’s: the latter one best avoided) to add extra pep if needed.

The only dish that didn’t really do it for me was the cheddar grits. I have had grits before, and never really been that impressed with them. I cannot say that I will try these again, although the cheddar gave them a much stronger flavour than if left plain: cheese tapioca as my companion described it.

The wine list is short, but nearly everything comes by the bottle, carafe or glass. So we had a glass of prosecco whilst we waited for a seat (or rather “while”, in keeping with the whole American theme) and a carafe each of the Traminer and the Primitivo once seated.

Then we had the zucchini pizzetta that they forgot (or, we suspect, gave to another table).

We decided against the coffee (which comes drip only, American diner style), but with six plates, a prosecco each and two carafes, the bill came to just over £50. Then they added one of the carafes that we had to point out to them that they had forgotten to include on the bill. Did I mention that the service was a bit relaxed?

Even when corrected, the bill is exceptionally good for this quality of food and wine in this area of town.

Russell himself was eating here as we left, and he seemed to get good service. For this to be as good as it could be, he needs to ensure that everyone else does too.

I really hope that Wills, who was dining here with his soon to be missus and the in-laws, had better service than we did. I don't know if the fact that He was there (together with a couple of very handy looking gentlemen with bulges under their left armpits) put the waiters off but, after my companion was anointed in extra virgin, the gentleman at the next door table took an espresso to the back. To make matters worse, whilst the maitre d' was charm personified, the actual waiters (and waitresses) were surly in the extreme; wanting to take our order the second we sat down, not bringing bread, forgetting the petit fours and taking an age to get the bill.

All this would have been fine had the food been excellent. It wasn't. It wasn't that it was bad (other than whatever was lurking under the, really quite lovely, buffalo mozzarella, which was oily and seriously off-putting), it just didn't coruscate at all. The lasagne was comforting as it should be but, whilst the linguine element of the lobster linguine was very nicely done, the main element was a bit of a let down. There was no bite in it or from the chilli.

We skipped the desert and went for the coffee, which was excellent. Not enough to make you want to rave about the place, but certainly enough to let you know that they really are Italian.

I am not sure why He and Her lot would want to come here mind: the place is full of a mixture of the suited hedgies and the ladies out a-lunching. There are so many better places that They could have chosen nearby.

Of course it isn’t all bad. As well as the aforementioned coffee, the main room upstairs (unlike the frozen tundra of the downstairs room) has a lovely buzz to it. The decor is plain, other than a rather racy picture hanging over the front desk: my companion tells me it was a “portrait” of the memsahib done a few years back. As the only thing that is covered, however, is her face, I am unable to confirm this tale.

A US foodie friend of mine doesn't do fish and chips. It's not that he doesn't do real junk food (he is American after all), so is a specialist in burgers (there are definitively no decent ones in the UK or, indeed, outside the US). He also loves his kebabs (or kebobs, as he is want to call them): the place next to Lidl on the Seven Sisters Road gets the nod for these, ahead of the efforts of Topkapi which was too posh, being dismissed as: “lamb salad”. He cures and smokes his own bacon for goodness sake. But no, fish and chips he just cannot handle.

This is a shame, as not only can it be excellent, this wonderful restaurant local to us does some of the finest in town, and I should like to introduce him. The restaurant has recently taken over the crepe place next door. I'm not sure what it is with crepe restaurants and Marylebone, but the last one got taken over by the Real Greek and this one too fell to the Greek owners of the Golden Hind.

The centrepiece of the room is an enormous, old style fryer, alas no long functioning, but still giving off that small of tallow fat and beef dripping that pervades the room. The room itself isn't much to write home about – it is functional, the tables are nicely spread out and it is light. It also has that lovely smell of fat and vinegar that always lingers too long when you fry at home, seeping into the clothes, but here, it just adds to the atmosphere of the place.

The cod (sorry, I know that I shouldn't) is lovely: golden, crispy batter, opening up to allow the steam to escape from a firm, white, flakey piece of fish. The chips are good, thick and have just the right amount of sogginess to soak up the vinegar and the mushy peas an almost luminous green. Service is friendly and brisk and the fact that this is a BYO can do no harm to the queue that is ever-present, competing with the ever-present queue out side Relais de Venise opposite. Me, I would stick to the fish and chips and the luminous green mush that you get here, as opposed to the luminous green sauce that comes with your steak and chips opposite. At least you know what the mush is.

The Bleeding Heart is an institution, which has grown from the restaurant (excellent), through bistro (good) to the Tavern (well, read on).

There is an upstairs that always seems to be packed at breakfast, and looks to be the place to be if you want some atmosphere. We were downstairs in an easily forgettable dining room with less atmosphere than the moon. Lunching at this time of the year is always a hard one: the City has come back from its self imposed lunching ban in January, and this time of year is packed with lunches, so I thought I'd just have a starter as a main course with a side salad. I chose the potted shrimp, one of my favourites.

“A starter as a main course size?” the waiter enquired. “No”, I responded “a starter size with a salad”. “So a main course size as a starter?” our waiter came back with. “No, a single, starter sized portion with a salad for my main course”. “So a starter as a main course size?”. This Chaplinesque banter could have gone on all afternoon, but I was hungry and I thought so what, I get two portions of potted shrimp, how bad can that be?

I wasn't that it was bad, it just wasn't good. The potted dish had no zing, no punch; I am guessing, no mace or nutmeg either, those two spices, the seed and its covering, inseparable in life and in potted shrimp.

Like the food, the wine list was serviceable: no surprises, nothing to stand out, but a fair enough selection of safe choices. As it was lunch, we only had the one glass each, a perfectly acceptable Trimbach Riesling, which is a rather good thing to have by the glass (especially given the serious pours that Charlie Chaplin gave us).

I will certainly try the breakfast upstairs here but, for a business lunch, I'll stick to the main restaurant and if it is a more relaxed affair, the bistro.

As we arrived at Nopi some friends of ours were leaving: chuffed to have beaten us to eat at the New Foodie Place Du Jour, they practically crowed about how great it was. And it is good, of that there is no question. The food is all lovely little dishes; the tapas style, that is all so de rigueur at the moment. They are well executed and well presented. But, and you just knew that there was going to be one, I felt ever so slightly let down by the whole experience.

The room is white tiled and functional (it doesn't have that lavatory appearance that tiled rooms can somehow have), with the tables nicely spaced and lights that look as though you can pull them down to lower them, '70's style. I resisted the temptation somehow.

The receptionist, bar staff and waiting staff were to a person fantastic; just on that right side of friendly without being over-familiar. The head waiter seemed mortified that he might have brought the wrong dish, when actually, given the number of dishes that we had ordered, I had simply forgotten. The waitress, however, did get the wine wrong, but insisted with such certainty that it was what I had ordered, we let it slide (it was lovely, by the way, and, as it had been a toss-up between two equally priced bottles, I wasn't that concerned that she brought me my second choice).

I like the way too that there is sparkling and still filtered water gratis, and there is none of that mucking around with a service charge for the, beautifully chewy, sourdough bread, a couple of slices of which arrive with some peppery olive oil once we were seated.

No, it was the food: it wasn't poorly prepared or poorly presented, but the expectation was so high that it simply couldn’t reach the heights that I had come to expect. Not at these prices: and yes, it is not what you'd call cheap. Tapas often can be expensive, but when the portions are sub-starter sizes and weigh in at above-starter prices, well you expect something out of the ordinary: you want uni or Jamon Iberica; you want your taste buds to sing out in joy. Three brisket croquettes (very nice and crunchy though they were) didn't quite have the tongue dancing.

At the menu’s suggestion, we duly ordered three dishes each, although if you were even mildly hungry, you could easily double that (we skipped the deserts, although they did sound good). The pick of the dishes was probably the Fondant Swede, which was an interesting twist on one of my favourite root vegetables. The halibut carpaccio was novel, coming with some samphire and little leaves. This was really a modern sashimi dish, and it raises a fair question: advertised as a restaurant offering middle-eastern food, where does sashimi come into it? I know that this used to be the home of the Sugar Club (one of the pioneers of fusion cooking), but it all seemed a little confused to me. We had sesami prawn toasts too: more doughballs filled with prawns than your traditional Chinese. Again nicely done, but give me the deep fried joys of the Royal China and I am a happy man. Good though they were, it didn’t really go with winter greens. OK, this may have been bad ordering on our part but, as things arrive in batches rather than in a set series, you'd have thought that the restaurant could have worked out which dishes went together and brought those at the same time.

Despite this confusion, I really did like it and I will almost certainly go back for a second helping and, having lowered my expectations, I am certain that I will enjoy it even more.

There aren't too many great fish restaurants in London and, whilst this is a perfectly acceptable place to while away a few hours with a pint of prawns and a muscadet, it isn't, in truth, even one of the best fish restaurants in Soho (thank you Wright Brothers).

We went for a late lunch on Saturday, and the place was packed. This is perfectly fine if you're in the mood to share a table, but the grumpy couple next to us looked most affronted that their bags would have to get down from the high chairs and sit at their feet, so that we could use the chairs for their intended purpose. We moved to a window seat when one became free before our order was taken. And the window seats are the ones to go for, affording a view over the joys of Soho traffic, some interesting Thai massage shops and being directly opposite Cox, Cakes and Cookies (despite this being Soho, I am pretty sure that only the latter two of these are on sale).

Service is slow, which is fine for whiling, but did mean that more of the afternoon was lost to a second bottle than we had really meant to lose. Not that they got anything wrong, they just didn’t get it right quick enough.

The cover charge brings olives and bread, which was perfectly ok. The calamari was also fine, had a bit of a tang to it, but wasn’t anything to write home about. The liver pate was a better than average example, although it did fox our French waitress.

Mains continued in the perfectly acceptable, nothing to cause a song-and-dance routine to spontaneously break out trend: roasted langoustines at nearly a fiver each were a bit of an ask (and the chips that came with them were really not worthy of the name). Pan fried scallops with fennel was probably the dish of the day, the scallops being nice and firm and the combination the sweet scallops with the tart of the fennel was a hit. Zucchini “frites”, alas, were soggy. Even a liberal dousing of sodium chloride couldn’t revive them.

So overall what to make of R&A: whilst I have always found the word “nice” to be bland beyond comparison, R&A is nice. It isn’t dreadful, it isn’t great – it is just fine; it is OK; it is a nice way to spend some time when there is nothing better to do than look out a window, sip a glass of cold white wine and not worry too much about the food.

I hadn’t been to Tom Aikens for years, although I do recall the famous spoon incident, which I thought had happened in 2004 – clearly, from the most recent of reviews, the man has not relented in his desire to account for missing cutlery. All I can say is that this remains one of the finest restaurants in London: quite how it has failed to garner a second Michelin star is somewhat beyond me, as the food is amongst the best in London.

I should, perhaps, add a word on my rating of 10 for “value for money”; the four of us went in February, when the restaurant ran (or is running, depending on when you read this) a promotion for customers of Berry Brothers & Rudd who get to BYO with no corkage. Hence we were able to quaff a Schramsberg Reserve 2000 pink sparkler, a 1988 Leeuwin Estates Chardonnay (which, even though it was a Denis Horgan Reserve bottle, was a little tired), a glorious 1982 Caymus Special Reserve Cab and a very youthful Ridge Montebello 2002, for which the restaurant received not a bean. How good is that?

From the moment we arrived, bearing our wines, we were made to feel most welcome. We sat in the (tiny) bar area with a glass of Fino, the menus and some amuse bouche. These consisted of an intense olive reduction; a highly truffle infused warm duck jelly and a parmesan and polenta ball. The latter may not have been to the same standard as Angela Hartnett, but to criticise it for such would be unbecoming.

At the table, things continued as they had started: service was polite, discrete and nothing but friendly all evening. The breads, from mushroom fleur de lys to bacon brioche, were uniformly lovely.

Starters too were excellent. The pick was probably the scallops with beetroot: the plate looking like a Jackson Pollack (not in the rhyming slang way, I hasten to add), and the intense flavours of scallop, beetroot and roasted red onion went superbly together. The salad of mallard was another visually pleasing dish, delivering intensely flavoured meat amongst the greenery, with white carrot tubes (like mini cannelloni) filled with various delights. The langoustine risotto, with a base of pea and an egg on top, was a joy, if a tad over-salted, whilst the crispy pork belly in the lobster dish was a strong counterpoint to a very delicate lobster and apple consommé.

Mains too were all on top form, with the suckling pig for two meltingly sweet, with a good layer of crackling. I am a big fan of suckling pig; yes, I know that the poor dears don’t get a long life, but they do taste so good. If you are a baby porker lover too, go to Segovia in central Spain, about an hour north-west of Madrid. It is a magical town in its own right; the cathedral rising out of Spain’s plain like an ocean liner through the waves, but it is the home to suckling pig. They worship the porcine baby. There are statues of great chefs, plates in hand, ready to do battle with the beautifully roasted whole animal; these plates, by the way, are not to bare the pig to the table (no, the splayed little dears come to the table in tiny roasting tins), but, as the meat is so melting soft, to cut the animals up with.

I digress. The suckling pig was very good, and the artichoke (and more pig, this time in the form of Iberica ham) and fennel side dishes went very well with it. Our guests had no complaints over their red mullet and salt marsh lamb dishes, but next to the pig, they barely registered with me.

By this stage, we were flagging, so I am afraid that I cannot tell you what the deserts were like: the cheese trolley, however, was a joy. Not huge, but with a lingering aroma (which they maddeningly kept bringing by and then taking away so that some other lucky punter could get a whiff).

I’ll certainly be back, although I may again wait until Berry Brothers have their next corkage free BYO promotion.