My nose is the only unapologetically snobbish organ in my body. If I’d been alive in the Paris of the 1790s, my body would have been eating cake with the sans-culottes, but my nose would have been for the chop. I can’t help it. You can’t train a politically correct nostril. A fart by any other name wouldn’t smell less like a fart. But it’s preferable to plug-in air freshener.

I miss cigarettes already. My children will never know the smell of an English pub – that steeped, kippered, claggy odour of sour beer, lies and tobacco. They won’t ever smell the cigarettes and bacon of early morning cafes, or the grainy gift-wrapping of Paris – pissoirs, pastis and Gauloises. I smoked untipped Gitanes for years, because the blue packet and fabulous aroma were aesthetically far more valuable to a full life than some pulmonary problem in the future. The wheedling orthodoxy may say that cigarettes are a prophylactic to social engagement, but the smell of tobacco on a donkey jacket is effortlessly more erotic than a bagful of potpourried G-strings.

Smells come and go, pervade our lives and then disappear on the wind. You can’t recreate a smell, but neither can you quite forget it. I still remember the odour of London fog, coal gas, steaming King’s Cross, Bronco toilet paper, Vim, Gumption, beeswax polish, fishbone glue, Silvo, shoebox brushes, wax crayons, typewriter ribbon, mackintosh, paraffin, linseed oil, Vicks, burnt feathers, butcher’s sawdust, puncture-repair kits, iodine and woolly plasters, lily of the valley on licked hankies, and patchouli on cheesecloth. All rare to extinct now and nobody to save them.

There is no national nose trust, no repository of nasal memory, no gallery of smells where tourists and schools can troop to breathe deep of a trench or the Blitz, Dickens’s London or Fanny Hill’s canny candlesnuffer. Smells are unorchestrated, untamed and unkempt. There is no defence against them. They steal up to resurrect the dead, rekindle love and lust, induce helpless melancholy. And always they remind you of loss: lost time, lost youth, lost friendship. Tobacco is one of the abiding smells of my life and soon it will be gone.

We’ve tidied up the olfactory landscape, sprayed it with the pervasive squawk of lemon and pine, grass and pulped fruit. At the moment, I’m being nose-raped by some sort of detergent or fabric softener or skid-mark shifter: a sweet, ersatz smell that pretends to be a Swiss meadow humping a fruit salad. It’s truly unpleasant, like being interrupted by a loony Ophelia on the bus. I suppose it supposes its toeses are roses. It italicises the antiseptic credentials of its host, like the human version of the paper sash on hotel bogs. When did we begin to think that clean should smell of anything at all? In extinguishing and gagging the raw air, we reduce our sensory world to a sniffily happy, infantile place. Notice that your food grows to smell less and less of less and less. People don’t cook herring because it smells of herring. The acceptable spectrum of dinner is a handful of Christmas memories: cinnamon, clove, orange peel, chocolate, berries and baking – the Starbucks range of nasal possibility. We should grow up, stick our noses somewhere they don’t belong.

Giles Coren has the odour of sanctity about him – which I think is attar of roses. Giles is the chiller-cabinet version of me on the Saturday Times, which is the picnic-hamper version of the banquet that is now engulfing your bed. I took him to dinner at Wild Honey, because I wanted to get some tips on how to do this job properly. I think I’m probably too codgered and crepit. I need to get down with the young ’uns, learn to worry the future instead of pat the past, care about how far my water has travelled.

I’m rather in awe of Giles. He is the food critic’s food critic, encompassing the shoulder-shaking humour of Matthew Fort, the modest expertise of Michael Winner, the literary pyrotechnics of Jay Rayner, and the dress sense of Charles Campion.

He brought his utterly delightful, though erotically martyred, life partner, Rachel, who was waiting with bated briefs to see if she had got a job as a lap dancer or barrister – I couldn’t quite hear which, and it’s embarrassing to ask again. You’d be surprised how conversations about either sound exactly the same. “So you have to stand up in front of a lot of old men? Twist things and bend over backwards for your client?” Anyway, she’s now either wearing a horsetail wig or a whore’s-tail merkin – I’m sure she’s perfectly brilliant in either.

Wild Honey used to be Drones, originally a club owned by Marco Pierre White and then Ben Goldsmith. Neither was wholly successful. I remember the kitchen as being mean, even for a racing yacht. This time it has been taken on by the estimable team from Arbutus. The menu is Frenchish – more French exchange, really. The ingredients are written in Frog, but the cooking style and construction are pretty Anglo.

We started with pistou soup, which was polite but uninteresting, and young, tender leek vinaigrette. Baby leeks don’t taste of much; they just have a vaguely unpleasant cold-condom texture. I chose a braised pig’s head with caramelised onion, which was a brick of adequate, and the calf’s head with sauce gribiche, which was better, but only because two heads are better than one.

The bavette of beef steak was cooked to be as soft as fillet. It wasn’t; it was like an end of boiled rope. The point of this cut is flavour – it was underhung. Giles’s Limousin veal with cavalo nero was the best choice, although the characteristic flavour of Italian winter brassica was entirely missing. In a blind tasting, I’d have guessed boiled barrister’s rug before cabbage.

Waffles for pudding were like packet breakfast. The best thing was a madeleine. It came with a so-so creme caramel. Service was chummy and attentive – and so it should be with Giles in the house. They use the service charge to make up the wages.

The Blonde liked the food better than I did. I think the quality of the ingredients all round was nothing like as good as the quality of the kitchen. But that’s just me. I asked Giles what I should write. He said it was all much better when he was here first time. So there you have it. Wild Honey – better if you go with Giles Coren.

12 St George Street, W1; 020 7758 9160. Mon-Sat, lunch, noon-2.30pm, dinner, 5.3010.30pm; Sun, lunch, 12.303.30pm, dinner, 5.309.30pm

Star guide: Five stars: Winning by a nose Four stars: Not to be sniffed at Three stars: Slightly off Two stars: In bad odour One star: A stinker

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