Brighton College, proclaimed as a “public school”, is going to offer weekly manners and etiquette lessons. Personally, I have my doubts about Brighton College. I have a feeling it’s the sort of establishment that encourages the pronunciation of the “aitch” in hotel, as in orange, and where matron probably says: “Manners, manners, Master Getty, say beg pardon when you pass wind.”

The first lesson of manners is that they’re never compulsory. I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened to me just then – I’ve been taken over by the ethereal reflux of Tatler. When I was whipping my snapper at the beginning of my so-called life as a journalist on the magazine for the socially insecure, I must have written the manners/etiquette article a dozen times. I could recite it in my sleep, in Swahili, except that speaking in your sleep is très common. Just so you know, the difference between etiquette and manners: manners are English and inclusive, etiquette is French and exclusive.

Etiquette is an arcane list of arbitrary and pointless conventions that are laid down as pratfalls for the aspirational, as an amusement for the unlovable. It’s etiquette that points out to the girl next to you that she’s drinking from the finger bowl; it’s manners that insist you drink from yours to put her at ease. This is an old truism, and I think I was the first to point out that, in fact, finger bowls are unutterably faux poshe, and any table that sports them is excused manners or etiquette, and needs only ridicule.

Mr Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, or Richard Cairns Esq, as he no doubt styles himself, is quoted as saying: “Good manners and etiquette at formal dinners is a deal-breaker in the business world.” He has plainly never eaten at a table of hedge-fund managers. “A lot of big businesses in the City arrange formal dances and balls.” I don’t know when Mr Cairns last left Brighton, but the next time he visits the capital, the absence of horse manure in the streets and the fact that it’s all in colour will surprise him. He goes on: “It [etiquette] is as important as exam grades and degrees.”

Every Thursday, pupils are sent an invitation to dine with Dr Cairns, where they are taught when to take off their jackets and how to use the cutlery. Oh, Professor Cairns, please, please, can I come? The Pooterish potential of Thursday-night dinners, presumably catered by the estimable Lady Cairns, has cosmically comic possibilities. I promise to keep on my jacket, and I could teach the boys how to eat bananas with a knife and fork, and how to remove unchewable lumps of gristle from your mouth while listening to a curate. I could teach them the etiquette of cocaine at black-tie dinners. I could explain HKLP (holds knife like pen) and regale them with polite anecdotes about the Japanese ambassador’s wife, who thought the foreign secretary was making a determined pass under the table, when all along it was the Prince of Wales’s labrador’s nose. And, before that, I could tell them that, as I am a man with neither manners nor etiquette, they really aren’t as important as exams or degrees (neither of which I have), and that any teacher who thought they were might seriously consider whether he’d been ploughing the wrong field. If you were considering Brighton College for your little Swithun, I suggest you dump him at Harrow instead. I’ve never met a Harrovian who could raise himself to the manners of a seagull. Mind you, they have the business acumen of starfish, but they make very good ushers at weddings, an undervalued and overlooked calling.

One of the things that the boom in restaurants has done is to kill etiquette stone dead. Apart from the occasional absurd club, I can’t think of a single dining room in London that still insists on dress code. Our polyglot cuisine, and the grazing nature of contemporary food, have meant all that formal “which knife?” nonsense is redundant. There is no elegant way to eat pizza.

We’ve imported a dozen cuisines, but not one set of manners to go with them. The Japanese, for instance, are swaddled with vast swathes of etiquette, but we’re excused the lot. Indeed, occasionally, we make it up. Like insisting on chopsticks for Thai food, when correctly it’s eaten with a fork and a spoon. The snuffing-out of etiquette is a good thing – apart from making the young and self-made uncomfortable, its main purpose was to obscure and excuse the vileness of the comestibles. We should all aspire to being Italian. Beautiful manners until we sit at the table, then go at it like liverish geese.

I have friends in Notting Hill. What a damning sentence. I have friends in Notting Hill who think I have it in for their local restaurants. I don’t, but their restaurants have it in for them. There is the belief that locals will eat pretty much anything if it is served by a fit Ukrainian, and pay virtually anything if she smiles. Westbourne Grove is the street of gastro shame, but there is, on it, one place I have completely missed.

The Tiroler Hut has been lurking in a basement here since the 1960s. You descend a steep flight of stairs into a grotto of winsome, woody and woolly German tat. (I’m happy to give Austrians the benefit of the Anschluss.) Why is it the Krauts imagine that what a cellar is missing is a dining room? They always plaster the walls with pictures of what you might see if there were windows, in this case snow-girt crags and wooden huts of the sort that house Mr Wet and Miss Dry. It’s tiny and it’s cramped, and it defies not just kitsch and taste, but Kraut kitsch and taste, and possibly taste and safety.

There are waitresses in dirndls, men in lederhosen and trestles crammed with chubby secretaries, cheeks glowing with the fourth or fifth flush of youth. And there is a box in which sits a young man in a hat, playing an emphysemic organ-style instrument. He plays and he sings, if playing doesn’t imply playfulness and singing can include listening to a Viennese security guard training a wilful alsatian. His repertoire is mainly The Sound of Music, with occasional other show tunes and, bizarrely, once or twice, Colonel Bogey.

There is a Mein Host, for whom bonhomie is a wrestling grip. He conducts communal singing as if it were the safety instructions on a doomed Heinkel. He can also play The Lonely Goatherd on cowbells, with the help of two semi-drunken women from the audience. That, on its own, is worth the price of admission, which is nothing. At about this point, I ought to mention the food. It is authentically 1960s London-Austrian: lumps and bits in clag and quag, crusted pools and emetic spills, all khaki. I tasted a steak, a schnitzel, a bait of herring, all inedible, unless you were as drunk as everyone else in the room, or on the death watch at an old people’s home. But food is not really the point here. The cost is minute, but still not within vomiting distance of value. People come here to drink and test the limits of their dignity.

I was taken by the bag lady Anya Hindmarch, an arbiter of soignée sophistication and élan. She says this is her favourite restaurant. She also brought Jeremy King, father of a 1,000-year reich of restaurants, including the Wolseley. I’ve known him a long time, and I’ve never seen him laugh until the tears roll down his cheeks. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen him laugh at all, just give the occasional Pinteresque grin. I’m not really making the full ’Allo ’Allo!, Carry On nature of the underground hut live for you. It’s as close as most of us will get to a Christmas party in Colditz. At the third time of bellowing Tomorrow Belongs to Me, I felt something snap, and I now have a cultural hernia. Without irony, the Tiroler Hut is crass, loud, repetitive, drunken, uncomfortable, embarrassing, cringingly stereotypical and tasteless on so many, many levels. Go now – take all your friends. It is possibly the worst venue ever for a first date.

27 Westbourne Grove, W2; 020 7727 3981
Tue-Sat, 6.30pm-1am; Sun, 6.30pm-11pm

5 stars: Krautstanding; 4 stars: In, Kraut, shake it all about; 3 stars: Kraut and about; 2 stars: Kraut of order; 1 star: Sour Kraut

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