Apparently, 90% of restaurant customers would rather sit and drink a disgusting bottle of wine than risk asking for a replacement. They are more frightened of being humiliated by a waiter than of the consequences of consuming gut-scouring vinegar. “Darling, the wine’s vile.” “Never mind – I’ve got a really good bottle of Pepto-Bismol at home. I’ve been keeping it for a special occasion.”

What do you imagine the waiter will do when you tell him his Chianti tastes as though a platoon of Togolese askari have used it to wash their pits before straining it back into the bottle through a freshly skinned civet’s rectum? How do you think he will react when you point out that the cork has plainly been utilised as a butt plug for a discounted catamite in the docks of Malacca? Will he say, “Sorry – I’ll bring you another one”, or is it more likely that a single spotlight will pick out your table as the waiter assumes a Yorkshire accent and launches into a stand-up routine from the Theatre of Cruelty? “Would you look at this couple: where did he find her? The In Memoriam section of the lonely-hearts column?”

The problem with the English and service is that they will put up with almost everything, but not actually everything. There comes a point when they can’t put up with any more: “I asked for a clean fork twice. I haven’t had an apology from the manager, I haven’t been offered a complimentary glass of champagne, my wife hasn’t been given a birthday cake and a spa treatment at Baden-Baden and I still haven’t got a clean fork.”

All waiters have stories about English people going completely, pyrotechnically spare about nothing, simply because, after years of smiling and saying “fine”, it’s their moment to overflow. They complain about absurd things. I’ve been told of customers who sent back empty plates, saying that the food was vile, but that they heroically kept going because they wanted to give the kitchen the benefit of the doubt – and why should they have to pay for being optimistic?

One man wanted compensation for feeling uncomfortably full. Someone else sent back the macaroni cheese because it was too salty. “But you added the salt,” the waiter pointed out.” “Yes,” the customer replied, “and it’s not an improvement. You ought to have stopped me. Anyway, I haven’t eaten it. You could sell it to someone else.” “But it’ll be too salty,” the waiter said. “They won’t know,” the customer retorted. “They’ll think that’s how it’s supposed to be – and nobody ever complains.” I love the Möbius-strip quality of that conversation.

When the English do complain, waiters tend to take it badly. And if you think humiliation is the worst they have to offer, you have led a sheltered life. I know at least half a dozen chefs who have regularly used meat as an intimate sponge bath. When I worked in kitchens, the entire brigade – me, a drunken chef, a West Indian dishwasher and a waitress with at least a dozen boyfriends whom she served daily – all spat in a particularly difficult customer’s vichyssoise. Cold leek and potato soup is a good place to hide emphysema oysters.

The rules of complaining are simple. Complain a lot, but do it with nonchalance and a sense of proportion. The fact that your cassoulet is tepid doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Smile – it makes a difference. I once got a fortune cookie that said, “A smile is the secret ingredient in the dish of life.” I beamed and showed it to my Chinese waiter. “What the matter?” he said. “You f***ing illiterate as well as eating like spastic monkey?” And remember, the cost of your dinner is likely to be more than the waiter gets for working all day. So consider who has the most to complain about.

A couple of years ago, I reviewed La Petite Maison, a restaurant in Nice where celebrities go who like to eat well, rather than to be seen. It is run by a terrifyingly effusive woman, and the food is as fine as you will find on the coast. The Blonde can still work herself into a labrador-like lather remembering a fried baguette sandwich with black truffles. Now they have opened one in London, in Brooks Mews. I must have reviewed half a dozen new restaurants within a fat man’s waddle of here in the past year. It has become a bit of a gastro-buffet.

I went with the Blonde and our friend Cami. The room is conservatively chic – very French, in a neat, clean and impeccable way, with not a single feature to startle or stick. It is the sort of good taste that English hoteliers and hedge-fund wives yearn to learn. The menu, too, is Frenchly French. The three of us shared delicate fingers of sweet onion tart and a mix of those delicately and austerely made salads – broad beans, artichokes, beetroot and courgette flower – that always bring to mind the girls in French shops who gift-wrap everything you buy, whom you never know whether to marvel at or to karate-chop on the back of the neck.

The Blonde had pre-ordered a whole roast chicken. This wasn’t just any roast chicken. It was a French black-legged roast chicken lying on its back with its feet in the air, smothered in another bird’s oversized liver, with a fistful of bread inserted up its cloaca – and it didn’t come from Marks & Spencer. It was as perfectly fine as a chicken still in its stockings with a duck’s unctuous innards and a sodden, fatty, crisp hunk of bread could be – which is pretty damn good. The Blonde and Cami adored it, saying it was the perfect dinner and that it was all they ever wanted – ever, ever, ever wanted – to eat. In fact, every other food ever conceived of or cooked was really only a consolation prize for not getting roast chicken.

Well, up to a point. I rather think roast chicken is what you eat at home. It is one of the great pleasures of home. Somehow, doing it in public is like slouching on the sofa in your boxers, eating Jaffa Cakes, while watching CSI Doncaster in the window of Dixons.

Pudding was disappointing. An individual tarte tatin is like an individual Yorkshire pudding – a dwarf travesty. With a couple of glasses of wine, the bill was just over £50 a head.

The rest of the customers were glossy and entitled – the sort of people who have been effortlessly complaining with every other breath since they could send their mother’s breasts back.

54 Brooks Mews, W1, 020 7495 4774 Mon-Sat; lunch, noon-2.30pm; dinner, 7-10.45pm
5 stars: Chicken coup; 4 stars: Roast chicken; 3 stars: Chicken soup; 2 stars: Chicken out; 1 star: Chickenpox

Book a table at La Petite Maison

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