In the end it was Giorgio Locatelli who asked the question, but it could have been anybody. We were sitting at the bar at Refettorio, his new venture in the City, eating a bit of ham, having a quiet drink, when straight out he said, as cool as a cucumber:

“Why don’t you just write about the food?”

Wow. God. Hell, I don’t know. Why doesn’t David Beckham just kick the ball straight? Why don’t you just have a main course and forget the aperitif, the starter and the little glance at the menu? Why not forget kissing and just get down to impregnation? Why bother with a nice long walk to work up a thirst for a country pub? Why…

To be fair, it’s a question I have been asked before. Usually by chefs. No, always by chefs. But here’s how Giorgio’s question came about. Two years ago I reviewed Locanda Locatelli. It was new, and so was I. I’d been in the job a few weeks and Giorgio, Britain’s most famous Italian chef, finally had his own place.

I went with a friend. He said the million-pound David Collins-designed dining room looked like the first-class bar on a 1970s Qantas jet. I went back to write up what was a very good lunch improved by lashings of wine and fun conversation. But as I sat and thought of what I had actually eaten it was hard to put my finger on particularly unique and exciting highlights. I found myself going hard at the flash decor and saying that in general I found risottos a bore. None of it was meant to imply that LL was a bad restaurant (I scored it a very respectable 7). But I was young and green. I wanted to be funny. I wanted to be interesting. I wanted you to like me.

But Giorgio was annoyed. A few weeks later someone pointed me out to him at Nobu and he made a beeline for me. We were nose to nose. I have a faint memory that it ended with a cry from Fay Maschler of: “Leave it, Giorgio, he ain’t werf it!”

I was terrified. But all I had to do was avoid Locanda Locatelli and I’d be safe. It was a shame because it was very good, and relatively near my home. But it was a cross I could bear as a price for my hubris. And then I saw Locatelli in my local coffee shop, and felt compelled to hide. It turned out he was local. I made many resolutions to reform my personality, but never quite got round to it. I wrote one or two conciliatory things in other pieces and his wife, I think, persuaded him not to kill me. And one day, bumping into each other in a pub in Archway, we shook hands.

Now I was desperate to make amends. I thought about re-reviewing Locanda, but you can’t do that sort of thing. And anyway I wasn’t sure how welcome I’d be. And then I saw that Refettorio had opened. At last, an opportunity to be, at the very least, fair.

It’s a sparser-looking place than you’d expect: pared down, unfrilly, hard edges, dark materials, erring on the minimalist side of modernity, spotlit, big. Not charmless, but certainly solid. With big fridges at the front full of hams that jostle like naked commuters fighting for the only seat in a phone booth.

Whether you sit at the long refectory bench or one of the bare wooden tables and await your faux-paysan, no-nonsense hessian place mat and napkin, or sit in the linen-covered posher spot at the back and round the corner, you’ll see the same menu: dark bronze and very hard to read in any light, let alone an evening-lit restaurant. It doesn’t matter, though, because the main feature is about a hundred hams and cheeses and vegetable bits so exhaustingly complete that your head will explode trying to choose. So leave it to the waiter (or to Pasquale Amico who steers the ship), it is all very good, so it doesn’t really matter what you have.

Try not to miss the lardo di collonata, though, which is air-thin strips of cured pig fat so uniquely melty that I think it must be the missing link between pork and air. You want to have it with these little carbo-puffs they do that look like Spoon Size Shredded Wheat but which are claimed to be fried gnocchi. And have the culatello di zibello, too, and some of the sharp, high cheeses with millefiori honey.

We had a lot of deep-fried things - squid, prawns, artichoke - that were fine but not heart-stopping, nor, perhaps, were intended to be. It’s about snacking, not worshipping. I had beef involtini’d with pine kernels and garlic, and there was eggless pasta, which may be all the rage in time of scarcity but gained little, I thought, by the absence of ova. The cooking was fine, but not as fine as the ham.

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