If estate agents are to be believed (a sizeable “if” I acknowledge) then property is largely a matter of “location, location, location”. If the fate of restaurants were to be similarly determined, as to an extent I suppose they must be – after all, stick the Ivy in North Korea and see if it can maintain its clients – then some worthy places would be finished before they were started. This would be awfully unfair in many cases. And there can be few better examples of this than One-O-One in Knightsbridge.

For if One-O-One were to be graded on the basis of its surroundings then Why-Oh-Why would be the only fair assessment. This establishment, ensconced in the Sheraton Park Towers hotel, has recently re-opened after a three-month break for a complete refurbishment.

This is a very long time for an institution which already had a respectable customer base to put itself out of action.

It involves not only the revenue lost while the doors are shut but the cost of what has been done, the expense of publicising the fact that you are open again and the danger that the old clients will have found somewhere else to lift their knives and forks in the interim and may not bother returning to their old haunt, no matter how impressive it was and is.

Now I never went to the old One-O-One and am perhaps not the best person to assess the improvement that this expense might well have inspired. All I can say is that if this is the end result then the old version must have been the last sector of London not to be done up in response to the Blitz. I cannot conceive of what state any restaurant could have been in to make a three-month closure for this to be worth it.

It is hard to describe the horror of this building without frightening the children. It is not assisted by being almost adjacent to Harvey Nics (which is a pretty spot) and opposite the flagship Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge (which resembles an enticing French country château strangely transported into the middle of West London), while itself being stapled on to the Park Tower Casino, which the uncharitable would condemn as shamelessly seedy and shady, but which, being a benign soul, I will describe simply as “louche”. The kindly would characterise the shape and visual impression of the hotel itself as something like “honeycomb”, but the candid would conclude that it is exactly what a concentration camp might look like if it were constructed vertically, except that this seems to be the one concentration camp in the history of mankind to be built for Americans to spend a fortune inhabiting.

There is, in short, little point in trying to refurbish your way out of this nightmare. There is absolutely nothing a chef can do, no matter how beautiful his or her food (and I will get there eventually, honest), to make his premises an area of outstanding natural beauty when it is surrounded by the architectural equivalent of a nuclear wasteland.

So, frankly, I would have called in Ikea or MFI and kept the refurb short and sweet, and would certainly not have bothered spending zillions on the bar and restaurant, let alone sticking out a press release asserting that “a handcraft table seating eight takes centre stage; its pearl essence texture reminiscent of the inside of an oyster shell”. If that thing resembles an oyster shell then Boris Johnson is a dead ringer for Prince (if the artist formerly known as that is content again with his name).

The tragedy of the decor and the location is that the food is the complete opposite of it. The head chef, Pascal Proyart, specialises in what could be summarised as seafood but is much, much more. The menu explains that the chef has created “petits plats” of food which he advises are best eaten as two starters per person, one main course and a dessert. This might sound like a cunning wheeze to lighten the wallet (and this is not a cheap night out) but is a sensible strategy for best coping with what will be prepared. What is on offer involves a degree of imagination and taste not easily matched anywhere.

The opening plates were three Tsarkaya oysters from Cancale chilled with yuzu sorbet and vodka foam; red tuna tartar with soft shell crab tempura, sushi rice and wasabi sorbet; pan-seared langoustine and duck foie gras, Peking duck consommé and hoisin froth; and Norwegian red king crab risotto, parmesan pancake, candied tomato with sauce bisque.

The striking feature in every case was the originality of the dish, the boldness in blending the component parts, and the stunning character of the taste.

The red tuna tartar with soft shell crab, for instance, might be at risk of being blasted away by the napalm that wasabi sorbet threatens to be. Far from it. The textures of fish and crab found themselves cemented together by the sorbet, not suppressed by it. Similarly, langoustine with foie gras might sound like something which offends several sections of the Old Testament (as well as the animal rights lobby), but they sat beautifully together.

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