A few weeks ago I wrote a short piece on the news pages of this paper about a Mintel survey which revealed that a massive surge in the popularity of eating out had led to a sharp decline in domestic cooking. You don’t get much time to write a news story, and in my haste to get something off which would have adequate punch for the front of the paper and effectively underline the domestic tragedy inherent in the story, I was rather too emphatic in my description of the awfulness of most restaurants. And a bit tough on chefs, who are decent fellows mostly, and have rarely reaped for themselves the financial benefits of this “restaurant boom”.

It was thus fair enough that a trade blat called Restaurant Magazine should devote an entire page in its latest issue to a photograph of me with a target on my face and a rant about what an awful person I am. But the magazine did little for the image of the business it claims to represent, I thought, when it called upon chefs across the country to spit in my food whenever possible.

And what an oddly British threat it was. The French would never stoop so low as to engage a critic in personal terms, and the Italians would by now have given me a lead napkin and sent me to eat with the crustaceans. Only the editor of a British food mag would invoke the skinhead’s nine-gob salute, that ultimate infraction of the health and safety laws that Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, identified both as a first-strike weapon in the
gastronomic class war and the best reason never to eat in a fancy restaurant again.

The funny thing is, I am unlikely to suffer. I don’t look like my picture, I don’t walk, talk, dress or behave like a restaurant critic (or much like a person with any sort of job). So I am never recognised. Annoyingly, however, when it came to getting a table at Rhodes 24, the restaurant newly opened by Gary Rhodes on the 24th floor of the NatWest Tower, I had to reveal my identity to get a table before Christmas. And I felt I really should go, because you are no doubt curious about what Gary has been up to since last year’s closure of City Rhodes and Rhodes in the Square.

Before resorting to self-identification, I tried everything, including enormous flexibility about timing. You can usually get in somewhere by offering to come late, say 10 or 10.30. Not here. Last orders
at 8.45. I’ll say that again: the latest you can arrive at a new and very expensive restaurant opened by one of our most famous chefs in the centre of what was
once the greatest city in the world is A QUARTER TO NINE!

Ye Gods, what sort of time is that for a grown-up to eat? I know Gary Rhodes is famous for his “nursery food”, but does that really mean we have to be in
bed by 9 o’clock with our teeth brushed and our little pink botties roundly spanked? Nobody in the gastronomically sophisticated cities in the world would dream of eating before nine.

And this is London: if you do eat early it is not as if there is anything to do afterwards. Cinemas do a “late” show only on Friday and Saturday (lest we should not get enough sleep to be in the munitions
factory bright and early next day), and it is famously impossible to get a drink. Turfed out of a restaurant at, say, 11 o’clock, what are you supposed to do? Stroll the Embankment rolling shopping trolleys into the river and setting light to home-less people?

When the friend I was eating with phoned up to say she had a meeting that might run late and could we make it nine, I called them. No, was the answer. Amazing. With a bill that tots up easily to £150 for two, the kind of people that come are going to
be people with jobs. And not ones from which they can just knock off at 5.30. She cancelled her meeting.

Still, it was a wonderful table: nice and big with our chairs at right angles to each other and both pointing straight at the floor-to-ceiling window. To our right, the Gherkin. To our left, just sort of lights and stuff. I think the best bits - river, bridges, Parliament, the things you goggle at from a plane - are on the other side. Maybe you can see them from the kitchen.

The menu was standard Rhodesian schooly stuff for fatboys in suits (of whom the clientele was almost entirely comprised - I think I would have wanted a table pointing at the wall even if the wall had not been a window) so we ordered potted mackerel, which was lacklustre, and oxtail cottage pie, which was encased in pastry and the size of a cocktail pork pie. Sweet and chewy it was, with a tiny swirl of excellent mashed potato, but I’d like to see the estate agent who could use the word “cottage” for something so tiny. “Outdoor khazi pie”, perhaps. The best starter was a heftily flavoured lobster and cheddar omelette served very wet indeed, so wet that one might almost have thought… no. It could never be. Not here.

Roast “bitter” duck was nicely done but a bit hulking: a great truncheon of dark meat cloven in four and served with a single, goitrous boiled potato and a thump of mashed parsnip, all of which looked a little indecorous lying before a young woman. Steamed mutton with onion suet pudding and buttered carrots was strong and sticky, and I dare say the beef fillet with bone marrow would have hit the spot, too. The last meat dish on the menu was “braised veal olive with tomato…” I have never eaten of the veal olive, but it makes a nice humanitarian change of source from the widely abused veal calf.

Although it is not in the class of Gary’s two recent closures, Rhodes 24 serves competent new-wave, old-school cooking (which is itself old-fashioned now, of course) in a crappy corporate room with a terrific, heart-stopping view which would be worth the trip alone, if you could get in.

For pudding we had the famous giant jaffa cake. Thrillingly executed but far, far too sweet for me. And the jam roly-poly was pointless, really: a big wet sock of suet with jam and custard that was no better or worse than that which I ate with no relish at all at my miserable school, back in the days when if you wanted to deliver spittal to your enemy, you did it to his face.

Food: 5
Dining room: 5
View: 8
Score: 6
Price: £60 a head, sans grog

Grand Café and Bar
Royal Exchange, Bank, EC3 (020-7618 2480)

Quality seafood (blinding lobster sandwiches) and wonderful views of the vast interior of one of the City’s greatest buildings.

Le Coq d’Argent
1 Poultry, EC2 (020-7395 5000)

Stylish roof garden with yet more thrilling City views. The suckling pig and seafood will serve you well.

E-mail feedme@thetimes if you know somewhere you can stay up late, and maybe we’ll go there together.

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