Startling news reaches us from the deep. Apparently, herring communicate by emitting noises from their anuses. They literally talk out of their arses. Actually, it’s probably not wind they pass at each other, but water — which, I’m sure, is nothing like as unpleasant for a herring as it is for, say, a grown man on honeymoon in Goa.

A point of pedantry here: technically, it’s not a back bottom, because fish don’t have front bottoms. Like birds, they have a cloaca, a single all-purpose vent. If you ask me (and I’ll take your perusal of my musings as a tacit acquiescence that you are asking me), letting evolution do away with our cloacas was a design faux pas. You know how it happened: the architect and the client were looking over the plans for protomammals and the architect said, “ We’ve got state-of-the-art warm blood throughout, there’s insulation with this new fur stuff and I’m toying with something radical in the cloaca department. We’ve got space for two, which will avoid confusion and give a great deal of added comfort.” “I don’t know,” says the client, “I’m used to one. Wouldn’t it be a lot more work and expense?” “No, no, today’s modern mammalian creation is all about leisure-time options. For instance, just suppose your female, at some time in the future, wanted to, say, simultaneously communicate like a herring and copulate like a polecat. Well, with my new design feature, you could do it with ease. Leisure options, that’s the future.” “Okay,” says the client. “But what are you going to call this new arrangement?” “Well,” says the architect, “I thought Piers and Morgan had a ring to it.”

The name herring, by the way, comes from the old Norse word for army, so the monks of Lindisfarne might have shouted: “Flee, flee. The herring is upon us.” You know how, on David Attenborough, shoals of herring all move at once, like double-jointed Venetian blinds? Well, that’s another Jacques Cousteau mystery explained. It’s synchronised farting.

Which brings me, not inelegantly I think, to the fashionable venue du jour, which this week is the Wolseley. No vent has been more ardently anticipated, no table more yearned for. Every single person I’ve met or spoken to in the last fortnight has asked me if I’ve been yet. Not because they want to know what I think, but because they want to tell me what they think, or what someone they know’s wife thinks.

You can’t beg, buy or fornicate for this sort of word of mouth. Indeed, the only people in London with enough previous to engender it are the Barnum & Bailey, the Smith & Wesson, the K&Y, the Lea & Perrins of hospitality: Chris and Jeremy, Corbin and King, from whose erstwhile Renaissance cloacas sprung The Ivy, Le Caprice and J Sheekey.

At this point, I have to give you the safety instructions. I have never reviewed The Ivy or Le Caprice, because I wrote both their books (still available). Consequently, I know Jeremy and Chris well, as well as many of the staff who have moved to the Wolseley. So bear that in mind. But then, they also know me well enough to know that if they do their job badly, it’s not a reason for me to do mine badly as well.

The first thing to be said about the Wolseley is: “Wow! Bloody hell!” It’s a beautiful room, built as the eponymous car showroom in a style that I think of as robber-baron imperial. Then it became a bank and, briefly, a misbegotten Chinese restaurant. Now it has been restored to look like a Hapsburg railway cafe, a Ruritanian patisserie and coffee house, a Bohemian grand-luxe bar and brothel. It’s quite unlike any other dining room in London, and apparently so authentically ancient, you’d think your grandfather ate there — much to the chagrin of David Collins, the designer, who’ll sob to anyone who’ll listen that he did everything.

The thing I like about it is the acoustics. There’s a big marmoreal echo, but you can be heard talking quietly round a table. It’s not all perfect: the tables themselves are too short (or the chairs are too high, or my elbows aren’t long enough and I have one leg too many), and the dining room has an obvious Siberia (along with an obvious Vienna, Prague and Berlin). I can tell immediately where the chic tables are going to be, and I know this is clever room management, cover covetousness, but I like to think that the European cafe that this is a homage to gave us egalitarian democracy and fraternity.

The menu. If the room is a thing of grand beauty, then it’s merely a marble sarcophagus compared to the menu, which is of a rare wonder and fecundity. It is the Rosetta menu, the menu of Kells, the Magna menu, the Declaration of dinner. If you had to name the one thing that Corbin and King are sublimely good at, it is that they both give great menu — an art that, sadly, most restaurants leave up to the chef. This is a mistake. A huge mistake. Chefs don’t eat normally or properly. They despise customers and they want to cook for photographs.

The menu at The Ivy is one of the most envied and plagiarised documents in catering. The Wolseley’s is quite as good. It encompasses Jewish and central European, American, French, Italian and British cafe eating. There are regular plats du jour, ranging from coq au vin to Irish stew and bouillabaisse. It has omelettes and schnitzels, chicken salad and chopped liver, iced coupes, sachertorte and apple strudel. It’s a carte that snogs the face off you — and most of it is made exceedingly well. The veal Holstein and Wiener schnitzel both oozed warm pleasure. The roast chicken salad was effortlessly the best in London. And the caviar omelette was impeccable. Some things, though, aren’t quite there. The chopped liver was too goy. The Brittany hot dog was a fair sausage unpleasantly wrapped in layers of crepe, like a rejected skin graft. Prices range from £3 or £ 4 to about £20. The Wolseley is open from breakfast to midnight every day. It has a Mitteleuropean tearoom and a good soak’s bar.

Okay, I’m getting off the fence here. I simply love it. It’s a restaurant that has been made from the front door in, not from the kitchen out. Oh, and as for the service: one of my guests asked for a shirt (they’re not on the menu). He wanted to go gambling. A clean one was produced in five minutes. Nobody can predict success in this business, but if the Wolseley isn’t it, I’ll eat Sean the doorman’s new hat.

Mon-Sat, 7am-12am; Sun 9am-12am

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