“Just one last question,” the interviewer from Australian Gourmet Traveller said. “Which joint, cut or offal of a human person would be your choicest portion?” I recoiled in shock and horror, the sour gorge rising in my gullet. How vile. How barbaric. I haven’t actually ever heard anyone say “choicest portion” out loud. It was repellent.

There isn’t a restaurant critic alive who hasn’t, at some time or other, given the waitress the once-over and thought, I’d rather eat your peppered jerky than anything on the menu. Eating people may be wrong, but it is interesting. I told the chap from Oz Tucker Walkabout that I’d always fancied the fat oyster muscle of the thumb. I reckon a dish of stewed thumbs diabolo would be diverting, or breaded, fried thumb Holstein, with a fried egg, anchovy and a little cucumber salad on the side.

“Oh, thumbs. Okay. It’s just that everybody says thumbs. All chefs want to cook a thumb.” Right, well, put me down for steatopygia of young Hottentot girl, slow baked, with mealie pap and piri-piri salsa. Nobody else has asked for that. And before you pretend you know, steatopygia is the genetic condition of storing fat in the bottom and thighs that is peculiar to the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They have shared it with a number of other Africans, South Americans and those lasses who appear in gangsta-rap videos. It’s possibly an ancient adaptation for coping with prolonged periods of famine, and it allows women to maintain enough fat to continue menstruating. Carrying it in that area doesn’t impede mobility, or, more crucially, lead to overheating. Ten thousand years ago, Europeans also probably boasted buttocks like burnished coal scuttles. Some say they’re caused by selective breeding for sexual preference.

Back to cannibalism. There are unsurprisingly few recipes for people. Most recorded cannibalism is ritualistic, consuming bits of defeated enemies or deceased relatives. Or, in extremis, shipwrecked sailors or arctic explorers gnawing on a cabin boy. There aren’t many cultures that have consumed each other as part of a balanced diet. The Aztecs had such a glut of man meat, they almost certainly ate it, and the Anasazi Indians of the American southwest controversially ate quite a lot of each other. Crucially, both these cultures lacked a big, domesticated, edible animal, so protein would have been an issue.

I’ve been thinking about cannibalism because of the new twins. It’s interesting how many visitors look into the cot and say, in a spooky Little Red Riding Hood voice: “I could just eat you up.” And there’s more than a hint of appetite there: a flash of bare teeth and licked lips. “Ooooh, I want to bite your little thighs,” said a godmother. It’s usually the women. “No,” she said, eyes shining, with a ravenous hysteria. “I really mean it. I want to eat his bottom.” The desire to see children as food smacks of more than just allegory and simile. We have a lot of fairy stories and cautionary tales about children being eaten by ogres and old women, baked into pies or fed through mincers, and fairy stories are traditionally where societies go to expiate taboos. And I think in a dim and twisted, half-starved past, baby was probably on the shopping list. A high infant-mortality rate would have made it that much easier to consider them dinner. I reckon you would get some pretty yummy crackling off a baby. I just asked the Blonde which of the twins she would eat, and I got a furious tongue-slapping. It’s too horrid even to contemplate. She couldn’t see it as hypothetical, which I also reckon is down to our distant history. The very first social rules of Homo sapiens sapiens are table manners, and the very first manner, the original etiquette, the acorn of all laws, instructions, rules, diktats, observances and obligations, best beloved, is don’t eat anyone you’re related to.

Hibiscus is a dining room that has evolved from Neanderthal Shropshire to a gallstone’s throw from Vogue House. That’s evolution. It’s difficult to know where to start with Hibiscus. Let’s begin with the menu cover. It is the oiled paper that’s actually made for cutting out stencils, and it smells, not badly, but distinctively and industrially. It’s an odd thing to miss for a restaurant that’s so precise about taste, because this is a foodie gastronomic-experience room. The place itself is expensively bland, purposefully pared down so as not to interrupt or snag the eye away from the table, where you’re supposed to be concentrating. This is big food, as in little food with big aspirations.

We took Ralph and Catherine from Botswana, who have eaten nothing but steatopygic bum and mealie meal for months. I made Ralph have the foie gras ice cream with brioche emulsion and vinegar caramel. Just let that swirl round the taste buds of your mind – trust me, it’s better than having it swirl around the taste buds of your mouth. I had the croquettes of sweet meats, tartare of native oysters with sweetcorn and Thai curry. Do you mean sweetbreads, I asked the waitress. “Not exactly.” And she pulled that face that Les Dawson used to do in drag, when making jokes about waterworks. Do you mean testicles? I asked. “Yes,” she mimed. Why don’t you say testicles, then? “Well, some people are a bit squeamish.” You don’t think the foie gras ice cream might have sorted them out?

Anyway, there is a perfectly good culinary term for bollocks: fries. Sweetmeat is something else altogether. “Well, yes,” she said, in that way that implies the customer may always be right, but that doesn’t make him interesting. Lamb’s balls have a Play-Doh texture, but the merest whispered flavour of fish, an echoed reminder of their biological purpose, which isn’t altogether nice. For main course, I went for the relatively simple tuna slow-baked in olive oil, with a caramelised pig’s head terrine, barigoule sauce and eucalyptus milk. The tuna was excellent, the pig’s head terrine well made. What they had to do with each other, I never really discovered. They were like two lost crossword clues. Eucalyptus milk is foul. Everyone else had veal or piglet that came with lots of things, including smoked chocolate sauce and parsley root. The high point of pudding was an olive-oil parfait with crushed-chickpea-stuffed date.

You’ve probably got the general ambience of dinner. It’s the food that tabloid columnists and stand-up comics used to get such thigh-slapping mileage out of mocking in the 1990s. And it did have a weirdly old-fashioned sense of déjà vu. Did we really eat this stuff? Little dabs and squirts of effluvia. Artful constructions, the juxtaposing of ingredients that normally would have been aisles apart in Waitrose. The texture and the taste were the leitmotif of late nouvelle cuisine: warm purées. It was the faint lukeness that I found most difficult, the temperature of blood and spit, of baby puke, and of a recently occupied loo seat. It’s not to say that all wasn’t well made, with care and skill and an effete taste. It’s not that the chef doesn’t deserve his many accolades. It’s just that, like constructing cruet sets out of seashells or decorating canal barges, it’s not a skill I value as highly as some. I can appreciate the effort and marvel at the dexterity, but I don’t warm to it any more than it warms to me. And it’s not cheap, at about £80 a head with all the bits and pieces. I’m never going to think, yum, what I really want this evening is pig roasted with sea urchins, kohlrabi and sweet potatoes. This is food sans appetite, form over function. Hibiscus isn’t the only restaurant with two Michelin stars.

Hibiscus

29 Maddox Street, W1; 020 7629 2999
Mon-Fri: lunch, noon-2.30pm; dinner, 6.30pm-10pm

Five stars I could eat you up

Four stars Finger licken’ good

Three stars Love bite

Two stars Thumb suck

One star Foot in mouth

Book a table at Hibiscus

Other places with two stars: Here are a few more to feast at

Pétrus, The Berkeley, Knightsbridge

The perfect place for a celebration – be it Dad’s 50th, a granddaughter’s 18th or just a seriously swanky work party. Marcus Wareing’s smart joint is constantly at the top of the “most” lists for its fish dishes and unparalleled roast-veal sweetbread and garden-pea extravaganza. A highlight is the dessert trolley. Dinner might set you back a bit, but there’s a very reasonable lunch deal: £30 for three courses.

Gidleigh Park, Devon

Set in a mock-Tudor mansion overlooking a hillocky vale, Gidleigh Park is all shiny and new after a year-long renovation. Trough your way through chef Michael Caines’s delicious slow-roast venison with braised pork belly, and make full use of the amazing wine menu. Let’s just say, you won’t be needing that cream tea after all.

Le Champignon Sauvage, Cheltenham

Pure out-of-town glamour. Le Champignon has been open for years and, despite its recent expansion, it has lost none of its charm. Chef David Everitt-Matthias is in the kitchen; his wife, Helen, is front of house. Go for the foie gras and the Gloucester old spot. You might even be able to stagger off later for an afternoon at the races.

Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles

Heave away from the 18 holes and park yourself in the tartan taste heaven belonging to Andrew Fairlie – the first winner of the coveted Roux Scholarship. You have to order the lobster – it’s his signature dish, achieved by smoking lobsters in their shells over old whisky barrels for up to 12 hours. The cheese selection is also outstanding.

Monsieur Mangetout

E-mail your recommendations to: mangetout@sunday-times.co.uk

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