Somebody has just written to tell me that he has invented a new sport: e-point-to-point. Contestants are e-mailed a random subject – “Drip coefficients in beeswax candles”, for instance – and have to use the internet to arrive at “Italian porn stars of the 1970s” in the fewest number of clicks and using only the blue hyperlinks. Don’t try it if you have a job.

There is a new word for this kind of aimless meandering through the glistening glades and dewy pop-ups of the web – that electric moment when you find yourself staring at a page of congenital genital deformities in circus dwarves annotated in Japanese, having utterly forgotten what it is you logged on for. There is a word for it, but I can’t remember what it is. I tried searching for it on the internet, and found myself reading a short history of the Moravian church, which naturally led me to Jan Hus, the Bohemian dissenter who was a follower of Wycliffe. And from him, I got to Lollard.

Now I have no doubt that, for most of you, Lollards inhabit the dingy attic at the far end of recorded knowledge. You recognise the name when someone at dinner says, “Then, of course, there were the Lollards.” You nod and reply, “Yes, naturally, the Lollards”, before swiftly asking for the peas.

Lollards turn out to be perfectly decent English heretics who minded the profligate wealth of the church and invented consubstantiation – that is, they believed communion could be both bread and wine and body and blood simultaneously. Catholics said: “That’s stupid – how could anything be two things at once?” To which the Lollards replied, rather cleverly, and I suspect a little smugly: “In the same way that Christ could be both man and God in the same chair.” The Catholics, who’ve never taken kindly to clever dicks, started burning them.

So how did they get to be called Lollards, you ask? I’m now in a position to tell you. It was a term of abuse from the Middle Dutch, first used in the 14th century, for members of the Alexian Brothers, who devoted themselves to digging graves and saying prayers for the destitute. Lollen is to mutter or mumble (we get “lullaby” from the same place). It led Chaucer to write the heavenly sentence, “I smelle a lollere in the wynde”, and from there it is but a breath to “lollification”, a fabulous word with only one recorded usage. It was coined in 1834 by a Mr Beckford, whose claim to immortality is the sentence, “A well-cushioned divan had been prepared for his lollification.” I want you all to drop that into conversation before Monday.

Moving on, we get lollop, lollpoop (a lazy, idle drone) and lollipop, another utterly delightful word, but with obscure origins – probably from lolly, a northern dialect word for “tongue”. Lollipop lady doesn’t arrive until 1960. And from lollipop lady, it’s merely a couple of clicks to the bouncy uplands of exhibitionist Latin totty on video. Simple. Which, coincidentally, translated into Italian, is the name of this week’s restaurant.

Semplice is stuck in a small street that runs parallel to Oxford Street at the discount end of Bond Street. Not for the first time, on my way, I thought: does London really need another bijou Italian restaurant? I was taking my old and decrepit theatrical friend Nick for lunch. He’s got his leg in plaster as a consequence of doing something ridiculous and embarrassing on ice. He arrived late, like Sarah Bernhardt taking an encore after Hedda Gabler. Strung between two stout sticks, and dressed up in CNN-style khaki with more pockets than Fagin’s laundry, he drew admiring and sympathetic looks from the room of lady shoppers and discount businessmen. He groaned and grunted to the table.

You’ve come as a foreign correspondent, haven’t you, I pointed out. So people will think you’ve just bought a fragment from a bomb in Basra for The Guardian, instead of tripping over a frozen dog turd outside your chalet in Courcheval and twisting your chubby ankle. “Don’t mock,” he sighed. “I’m suffering from shell shock.” Only because the oyster season’s over.

Semplice is an elegant little room with swirly gold walls, which Nick said brought on his postpsychedelic stress syndrome. I recognised the maître d’, which makes a change from the other way round. He used to be at Locanda Locatelli and recently started this place with a chef.

We began with carpaccio, which was made from some named arcane breed of Piedmontese cow. “We use only the females,” the menu boasted. How very Italian. It was as good as the raw bottom of an Italian bint on all fours could be. And just when I thought there were no surprises left to be had from Italian menus, there was a broth of chickpeas with roast quail and lardo di colonnata as a starter. Nick sucked it for his leg’s sake.

I had the penne, which apparently came from Gragnano. This might have been a small, picturesque village, but could equally have been a Kwik-Fit fitter from outside Turin. It came with pork cheek, peas and red onions, a combination that goes together like Harpo, Chico and Groucho. Much of the brilliance of Italian cookery is in finding blessed trinities of ingredients. Often, with this dish, there’s a parsimony about the swine chaps – they think the English will be squeamish, wanting a taste, not a mouthful. But here they were generous with the sticky shards of glutinous pig face.

Nick had a brilliant yellow Milanese risotto with bone marrow, because, he said, it was invalid food. The rice hadn’t quite absorbed enough of the liquid, but the flavour of saffron and osseous, blood-manufacturing fat was splendid. My special of roast veal was a bit of a disappointment compared with the standard set by everything else: a tortured roll of milk-fed beef, slightly overcooked, but with a nice pus of polenta.

Pudding was a selection of ice creams and sorbets. “Oooh, taste that,” Nick exclaimed, as if he were dubbing a porn film. “The basil sorbet tastes exactly, precisely, miraculously like fresh basil.” So it did. Which is neither surprising nor terribly nice. A mouthful of cold, wet basil isn’t my idea of pudding.

Coffee came with its own business card. This personalising of ingredients is getting absurd. Apparently, it hailed from Haiti. Anyone who manages to get anything worth having, let alone consuming, out of Haiti deserves admiration and probably sedatives. But this was utterly spectacular coffee and worth a trip to Semplice all on its own. The menu is not cheap, but not expensive for this quality of food – and the set lunch, at £15 for two or £18 for three courses, is probably the best value in the West End.

“I’ve been on the internet, trying to find some of that coffee as a thank you for lunch,” said Nick. Did you get any? “No, but I did find this amazing Italian bird. I’ll send you the link instead.”

Semplice

10 Blenheim Street, W1; 020 7495 1509, Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 7pm-10.30pm

5 stars Lollification 4 stars Lollapalooza 3 stars Lollygag 2 stars Loblolly 1 star Lollpoop

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