5 stars: The world at your feet; 4 stars: Happy feet; 3 stars: Finding your feet; 2 stars: Cold feet; 1 star: Six feet under

I went to see Savion Glover, the world’s greatest living tap-dancer. I don’t know how they measure these things. We just take it on trust, like people who tell you that they have the best dentist. How do they know? Who tries out dentists? “What are you doing this afternoon?” “Oh, I’m just going to see another dentist a friend at work recommended.”

It’s the same with accountants – everybody has a brilliant accountant – and, most worryingly, with surgeons. Old people who have tubes up their noses and smell of disinfectant grab your wrist and hiss: “If you ever get cancer, you must give it to this man. He’s got magic fingers.” Really? So how many did you let loose on your prostate before deciding to give it to the best one? Was there a little award ceremony? Did you announce the results in reverse order?

Anyway, someone has auditioned every tap-dancer in the world and decided that Glover is the greatest. So, we’re in Sadler’s Wells, and I can’t help noticing the audience. They’re much thinner than theatre audiences, who are beginning to look like the queue for How to Look Good Naked. This lot are skinny and need hip replacements, and there’s a high proportion of lesbians. Thin lesbians – when did you last see a thin lesbian? The lights go down and a modern jazz band comes on, which has never been my idea of the start to a perfect evening. They’re followed by the Tiger Woods of tap, who does what it says in the programme. He taps. With his feet. Both of them. Simultaneously. It’s like a sheepdog trying to herd music – or, rather, jazz.

It’s sort of amazing, but I’m being bothered by the tinnitus of a question. What am I supposed to think while I’m watching it? Tap-dancing doesn’t have a narrative or a plot. It doesn’t draw pictures or allude to other images or emotions or things (except woodpeckers, mechanical processors and drills). It’s just feet moving very fast. Everything that happens above the ankle is a frantic balance, like an amateur tightrope walker on a sagging wet hawser. Why is it that tap is so compulsive?

I asked a friend, who’s on the board of various contemporary dance companies, what I should be thinking. He thought for a moment and tapped his fingers: “I wish I could do that.” Well, okay, that might sustain me for 10 minutes, but not two hours.

The “I wish I could do that” reaction is something tap shares with the ukulele. You could say that tap is to dance what the ukulele is to music. Both attract large numbers of amateur rhythmless and tonally challenged inepts, who attain a level of proficiency just sufficient to sustain maximum annoyance and discomfort at all social gatherings. Tap and the ukulele are also most often played in a jocular, self-parodying nature, as part of a light comedy routine or variety act. They’re rarely done without the inverted neon commas of irony. Except by Glover, who didn’t have a funny bone in his foot.

So I watched and wondered what I was supposed to think. And I slipped into a formless reverie, like when you stare out to sea. Not really watching, just free-association seeing. There is something about the tapping that holds your attention without demanding anything from it. Dance is the oldest art, older than music, probably older than speech. And older than dance is rhythm. Maybe that’s what is so mesmerising about tap: a rhythm, a thrumming, buried too deep in our primal origins to understand. Unfortunately, ukuleles haven’t been buried deep enough.

Sadler’s Wells is virtually a provincial theatre, glowing about 30 minutes from London in Islington’s bottom. As ever, the answer to the question “Where shall we eat in Islington after dark?” is: “Chew gum in the cab until you get to Soho.” For somewhere that is the cookery-book capital of Britain, Islington really doesn’t seem to care what it eats in public. When I lived out here, its formal religion was dinner parties. I suspect that being seen to eat out is an admission that you’re Tobin and Tabitha Nofacebookmates.

The man who recommended I think about how much I wanted to tap also said that we should eat at Frederick’s, in Camden Passage. Frederick’s is a bit of an Islington institution – which is to say, it was here the last time I was. A large, airy restaurant on a street of bijou notion-purveyors, it has bright, abstract art on the walls, of the sort that only ever appears in restaurants, and has been created primarily to offend the least number of people for the longest amount of time.

There’s also a large tree. I like a dining room with a tree. It offers all sorts of Edenish references, bringing the ancient, bosky gods of fecundity and plenty into the carvery. Italian restaurants in the late 1970s always had big terracotta pots with dried sticks in them that shed laxative leaves into your antipasti.

The menu has no coherent theme. It’s the sort of compilation that comes from kitchen caprice, customer preference and regular deliveries. You find them in local restaurants that have slipped into the comfy chair of least resistance or thought.

We started with prawn cocktail. It lacked the brassy, fuchsia lipsticky, saucy snog that makes it a bit of a goer. It had been given an Islington makeover – and the worst thing you can do with a prawn cocktail is try to refine her gob appeal.

Haddock fishcakes were large, dull lumps of fish-style blob, like talking to a taxi driver stuck in traffic. A fillet of beef was memorable – sadly, because I’d much rather forget it. But even worse were the side orders of vegetables. Beetroot was a purple blot that tasted metallic and industrial. Dauphinoise potatoes weren’t dauphinoise in any sense that would be recognised by Larousse Gastronomique. Spinach was bitter green sludge.

Side orders are all too often like this, prepared too far in advance with too little care. Parsimonious and wizened, oily from being kept too hot for too long, they’re plonked-down, unloved, motherless dishes that don’t seem to belong to anybody, and go back to the Barnardo’s of the kitchen to be binned.

A tarte tatin was burnt. Burnt apple. Why would I want that? And why would they want to serve it?

A sweet waiter asked if there was something wrong with the fishcakes. We told him gently that they were boring us to death. Why he particularly singled out the fishcakes from the piles of congealing manna on the table, I couldn’t say. But he took them off the bill, which was decent of him. The tarte tatin was £5.50, the beetroot £3.50, the potatoes £4.25 – all a straightforward write-off.

As we drove back to the capital, I realised that just round the corner from the skinny lesbians was the hamlet of Exmouth Market. We could have eaten at Moro. Now I’ve got to wait for the world’s greatest flamenco dancer.

Camden Passage, N1; 020 7359 2888

Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 5.45pm-11pm

Book a table at Frederick's

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