32 Great Queen Street is the name of the restaurant you’ll find at 32 Great Queen Street. I rather wish it could have been at 65 Balls Pond Road. There is an honest literalism about using your postal address as your name, but it doesn’t imply a lightness of wit or anecdotal sparkle. Thirty-two, as I’ll familiarly call it, sits opposite Freemasons’ Hall, a building of monumental, fussy ugliness. It reminds you of a huge Queen Anne reproduction cruet set. You’d have thought a secret mystical society, based on the knowledge of the masons who built Solomon’s Temple, might have come up with something less like a Lancashire bus terminus.

Thirty-two is an offshoot of the Anchor & Hope, a good restaurant that lives in the Pig & Whistle. Joking – it’s in the Anchor & Hope. Inside, the walls are painted blood clot, and the ceiling, dripping. The tables and chairs are reduced to their most utilitarian form: flat surfaces are maintained at an ergonomic height by four legs. There are no tablecloths; napkins are paper; cutlery does what it’s meant to without making you want to slip it into your pocket. There is a sturdy bar with sturdy bar stools for sturdy bottoms. There is wine, which, I expect, is also sturdy. The lighting must have cost a penny or two, but not much more. There are no pictures, no extraneous, falderal eyewash. The kitchen is visible through a hole in the wall, and the waitresses are as serviceable as the furniture. They are healthy, scrubbed, clear-eyed and handsome, in a eugenic and fit-for-purpose way. None of this is by accident, and none of it merely expedient.

The menu is one A4 page, neatly printed, with 20 dishes that come as either mains or starters, and five puddings. None has a fancy name. Like the restaurant, all are called by their identifying parts – Arbroath smokie, cream and chives; beetroot, goat’s curd and mint. The page is innocent of adjectives, and foreign and culinary terms are used only if there is no Anglo-Saxon alternative. Again, this isn’t through lack of imagination or limited vocabulary. This room, this page, is telling you something eloquent and complex and important. The food is what we’d now call English.

When I started this job, a decade and a half ago, all critics would lament the absence of a recognisable indigenous cuisine. What we had instead was Gary Rhodes and his cheeky, grim frotting of nursery food, with what was invariably called “a twist”. It is a stated rule of life that anything that comes tagged with the jaunty addendum of “a twist” will be hideous, hopeless and kitsch. Which pretty much encapsulates Rhodes’s oeuvre. My low-point favourite was his signature haddock covered in Welsh rarebit mix and tomatoes. Mmm-mmm. It was either that or the rustic repast of rural-weekend hotels that produced National Trust food on Mrs Tiggy-Winkle plates: nostalgic Victorian possets and puddings, all jugged and jellied, just never with the right ingredients, always twisted lighter or smaller – fillet replacing skirt; lamb instead of mutton; kiwi, not quince.

I particularly remember the horror of tomatoes stuffed with haggis in a whisky jus. I thought that rationing and my grandmother’s cooking had, between them, boiled to mush any vital, authentic British food. The handmade, mother-to-daughter chain of making and feeding had been broken. A real national menu can’t be imposed from the top down, because it grows out of husbandry and the garden and kitchen tables. We lived in an urban nation, where people would rather go out and eat English-lite-with-a-twist in an overstuffed, poncy restaurant with hunting prints than cook real English at home on the Formica.

But now I’m eating my words, and very tasty they are. Thirty-two must be the eighth or ninth restaurant serving this sort and quality of food in this sort of room that I’ve reviewed in as many months, and I know of at least a dozen more. This isn’t just a fad or an east-London oddity, but a real movement of real English food. The simplicity of the decor, the menu and the message is indicative of the sense of purpose and the heritage of this food. It takes its style not from country hotels, old gentlemen’s clubs or grand plutocrats’ dining rooms, but from pubs and caffs of the sort that is disappearing, and the rural, bottom-up element comes from the organic and green movements, the hundreds of slightly loopy hippies in Peruvian hats and cut-down wellies making ewe’s cheese from sheep with names, breeding malevolent chickens, picking mushrooms under a full moon and driving chip-fat-burning 2CVs to farmers’ markets.

Now, I have issues with all of those things, but together they have produced the muddy ingredients and the imperative for a coherent national grub. And what I particularly like about it is that it reflects a lot of particularly English qualities that have got lost or dumped or sneered at in much of contemporary culture. Taciturn directness, thoughtfulness, a pleasure in craft, a mistrust of art, a joy in small things and details, a belief in the quality of sturdy things, openness, honesty and blushing. This is Leveller food, nonconformist, with a touch of piety and a subtle, ironic humour. If you can’t sense all that in warm duck heart, bacon and foie gras salad, then you’re not concentrating. Or you’re Belgian.

The Cromwell of this new commonwealth of trenchermen is Fergus Henderson, with his biblical nose-to-tail eating. But, although the ingredients and philosophy are forthrightly indigenous, the methods are not. The simple combining of ingredients, the less-is-more, is Italian. Best is that none of it is remotely snobby; it claims no airs, pulls no graces. There are no raised-pinkie manners, and it’s relaxed and confident enough to borrow stuff from around the world if it tastes good, as all vital cuisines must.

32 Great Queen Street does it all very well. The Blonde and I took Emeric, the movie mogul. He loved it in the way that moguls love very unmogulish things, and quite fiercely demanded that I give it a winning review. High points were the beetroot salad and goat’s curd, fresh crab on toast, a beef rib for two with chips, a lemon pot and a flourless chocolate cake. Prices run from £4.50 to £20 for the beef. Wine comes in tumblers. The tips all go to the staff, who eat their dinner from the same menu. The room had that nice, relaxed, English buzz. I asked for ketchup. The waitress bustled back and said they didn’t have any. It wasn’t, they wanted me to know, through any snobbery – they just couldn’t find it.

What’s odd and a little melancholy about all this food is that it harks back without being nostalgic. It’s reminiscent of an England that never existed. We never did quite make it. An elegiac, shimmering Albion – it’s there in touches of Blake and Priestley, notes of Tallis and Vaughan Williams, dabs of Turner and seaside postcards. It’s in Bunyan and Swift and Palmer. And if you think that’s embarrassing hyperbole, then it’s your loss. You’re eating with only half your head. Wake up and smell the potage.

32 Great Queen Street, WC2; 020 7242 0622

Tues-Sat, lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 6pm-11pm. Mon, dinner, 6pm-11pm

5 stars: Cool Britannia; 4 stars: Best of British; 3 stars: British bulldog; 2 stars: British weather; 1 star: Rip-off Britain

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