Have you ever wondered why there aren’t cosy little Swiss restaurants sprinkled around the world, the way there are French bistros, Italian pizzerias and Chinese and Indian restaurants? What I mean is, have you wondered for more than three seconds?

A clue: it’s the food. Trust me – I’ve just returned from a week in the Jungfrau region, where I breakfasted, lunched and dined on Swiss cooking. Swiss food is a bit like Mexican food: the last time you ate it was so long ago (in my case, while visiting the Jungfrau a year earlier) that the next time you try it, it seems novel and interesting all over again. Cheese fondue – yum! Raclette – scrummy! Sausages the size of a baby’s arm peeking out of a bread roll no bigger than a golf ball. Rösti! Rösti with fried eggs! Rösti with fried eggs and ham! Rösti with grilled cheese! Rösti with fried eggs, ham and grilled cheese! Did I mention the Swiss do fondue? And raclette?

Same with Mexican food. This is the timeline of a visit to a Mexican restaurant. Minute one: “Mmm… tortillas! Aah… tacos! Refried beans! Chicken in a chocolate sauce!” Minute 92 in a Mexican restaurant: “Hey, do you suppose the refried beans were imported from China? Because I would swear they had a high lead content. Why else would I feel like I swallowed a medicine ball?”

The Swiss and the Mexicans both seem gastronomically wed to carbohydrates: bread in fondues; potatoes with raclette; potatoes in rösti. With Mexican food you have tortillas, beans, tacos and more beans. The Swiss eat as if they are all still dairy farmers, marching their cows up and down the mountains whenever melted snow permits, and therefore have to consume vats of carbohydrates every day to keep up their strength, while simultaneously subsisting on their own dairy produce to make ends meet (hence all the cheese and chocolate). A Swiss citizen is never more than 90 minutes away from a snack of melted cheese. Nobody seems to have told them that they no longer need to eat 18,000 calories a day; they work in offices nowadays, not on mountains, and mostly produce money. Obviously, you can’t eat money, so it is important that there remain enough poor labourers in the world to plough fields and grow affordable food. But such people no longer dominate Switzerland. In fact, this is one of the key weaknesses in the theory of capitalism: the minute everyone in the world becomes as rich as a Swiss banker, there’ll be no one left to grow our food. When that happens, we will either have to start eating money from our bank accounts or consume the only freely available protein left: namely, other humans who can’t run as fast as we can.

Unlike an unending diet of fondue or burritos, you can always happily contemplate a bowl of French onion soup or a plate of steak frites. That’s why French bistros thrive. Actually, they don’t thrive as much as you assume. We think they’re on every street corner, but there are far fewer in Britain than we imagine. Those that exist are usually part of dreary identikit chains, and it is only when you come across a place like L’Absinthe that you appreciate how rare proper bistros are in this country.

L’Absinthe is the sort of bistro that is sprinkled like chopped parsley across France. Pretty much everything about this restaurant is deliciously alien to London dining. L’Absinthe is not part of a chain. You want to eat pretty much every dish on the menu. Most main courses are under a tenner. A good range of wines is sold at shop prices plus corkage. The staff look like they are enjoying serving you.

And – are you ready? – they don’t churn tables.

“Might you have a table if I drop in at around 10.15pm on my way back from a show?” I asked.

“I can’t guarantee,” was the reply. “We’re full and we let diners stay as long as they want. We don’t kick people out. But I’m sure that someone will have left by then, so there is a very good chance.”

The phrase “We let diners stay as long as they want” is something you hear as rarely as “I love all of Sylvester Stallone’s movies”, or “I just can’t get enough of Mick Hucknall’s voice”, or “If only I could find out where Russell Brand gets his hair done!”

The line disconnected during our conversation and when I tried calling back over the next 20 minutes, it was busy. I phoned the operator to check the line was OK. She said: “I’ve just dialled the number and it was answered by a cheery Frenchman who said that they’d had a busy morning.”

The cheery Frenchman is Jean-Christophe Slowik, L’Absinthe’s proprietor and for the past two decades the front-of-house face at more than half a dozen Marco Pierre White restaurants. All his staff seem to be French. Many of the diners, too. It’s still tempting, whenever you find yourself peering through the plate glass trying to decide where to eat, to interpret this as evidence that the natives of the cuisine know a good thing when they eat it, even though you’re keenly aware that McDonald’s outlets in Missouri are full of Americans.

To his credit, where Slowik could have plumped for the full ’Allo ’Allo! effect, he has listed dishes on the menu first in English and then in French in a less prominent type below. It’s a small touch, but an endearing one in an arena where many restaurants not only list dishes in French so they can smirk at monoglot diners who have to request explanations, but also describe ingredients and cooking methods using words they seem to have only just invented (“Flambinard avec ses ongs, accompagné par truffe ‘Fifi’, sauce Hortensaise”) so that even native Frenchies feel cowed.

L’Absinthe’s menu is the one you remember from French holidays. Leeks vinaigrette with a poached egg, Bayonne ham with celeriac remoulade, a Lyonnaise salad busy with frisée lettuce and lardons, a comforting plate of French toast with mushrooms and shallots confit. Cassoulet was a bowlful of beans, sausages and lamb under an umbrella of breadcrumbs. Duck confit came with Savoy cabbage. Both dishes are under £10. Steak frites was a slice of Scottish ribeye with excellent chips, the sort of dish that you hope to see on every menu but is generally deemed too humdrum (restaurants tending to use the word “humdrum” as a synonym for “Just what diners fancy”). The apple tarte tatin looked sensational, but the kitchen had run out by the time we ordered. A neighbouring, luckier table gave it the thumbs-up. A chocolate cake was barely a notch firmer than a mousse.

Is the food at L’Absinthe the finest you’ll find anywhere in London? It would be hard to put your hand on your heart and swear that it was. But most people don’t go out to eat to run up a £100-per-head tab on manicured mangetout. They go to meet friends, catch up with their partner, avoid their own kitchen. Where better to do this than at L’Absinthe? If the restaurant enjoys the success it deserves, and remains ungreedy enough not to start kicking diners out to accommodate a second sitting, it will become that mythic beast: the neighbourhood restaurant you’d love to find opening up on a street corner near you. Especially if you’re Swiss.

L’Absinthe, 40 Chalcot Road, London NW1 (020-7483 4848). Lunch and dinner, Tuesday to Sunday

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