The Square
6-10 Bruton Street, W1; 020 7495 7100.

Mon-Fri, lunch, 12pm-3pm; Mon-Sat, dinner, 6.30pm-10.45pm; Sun, dinner, 6.30pm-10pm

Five stars Hip to be square; Four stars Good square meal; Three stars Fair and square; Two stars Albert Square; One star Square peg in round hole

There is an old-fashioned printing lag between what I’m saying and what you’re hearing. Who knows what might have happened? The imminent (or past tense) collapse of capitalism as we know it fills me with a naughty, giggling joy. I know it’s silly, but I can’t help it.

I’ve just been asked to do an after-dinner speech for an international financial institution. I get asked to do after-dinner speaking quite a lot. God knows why – very few people who have actually heard me speak after dinner would pay to hear it again. There is a shadowy nether world of entertainers who come out with the coffee and mints and do turns like medieval fools for top table. Defunnied comedians; presenters of axed television programmes; cricketers with dodgy groins and remaindered memoirs; a small, excitable herd of comic professional panellists; men who have dragged their misanthropy, anger and lack of self-worth to the poles, up mountains and through swamps; people who, through hideous chance, have been kidnapped by the theologically challenged or lost multiple limbs to alligators or drugs; women whose faces, tits, smiles and hair are fake, and who have ghost writers; motivational self-advertisers who talk and point at the same time; old, grey men worn smooth by the repetition of one experience, one joke; golfers; and, I suppose, occasional journalists, will all turn up to talk at the annual get-togethers of service industries that are neither industrious nor provide a service.

I can horrify myself imagining what it would actually be like putting on the greasy, kippered dinner jacket with the pits smelling of muck sweat, setting the satnav, trundling up the motorway in the evening gloom, pulling in to the Tudorbethan golf spa hotel, and the smell of years of budget fine dining, vomit and ambient scent balls. Being met by Helen from Communications and taken to the small room with the five bottles of water. The sliding glance over the sticky notecards, and “Would you mind having your photo taken with the MD’s wife?”; “Sign a book for Nigel in HR”; “We’d be ever so grateful if you’d have a drink with some of the lads in marketing”.

And then the dining room and 90 minutes of tiny talk, like prodding an ulcer with a vinegared Q-tip. “How do you think all that stuff up?” Then the facetious introduction. “Well, we promised you a man who needs no introduction, but, sadly, Jeremy Clarkson couldn’t make it. But not content with second best, we threw in the towel. And here, instead, is the thinking man’s Denis Norden, the Colin Montgomerie of invective, a man who is to restaurants what a suppository is to a constipated air-conditioning fitter: after he gets stuck in, the shit hits the fan. Thanks to Trev in the warehouse for that one. Anyway, enough from me, here he is to talk about something, the only and one AA Gill.”

Some people’s nightmares are waking up naked in Harrods during a sale. Others, finding themselves at the altar about to marry a depilated devil-goat with a squint. But for me, it’s the “seasonal vegetable selection” hell of after-dinner speaking. And like all worst nightmares, I’m strangely and horrifyingly attracted to it. The bank said they were looking for someone without any particular knowledge of banking. I bet they are – look where the ones with the particular knowledge of banking have got them. There is more than a soupçon of honeyed pleasure in seeing the ashen usurers, terrified bond dealers and poleaxed fund managers. It’s not that a recession wouldn’t affect all of us. But emotionally, irrationally, I relish the squirming terror of all those with little talent and a lot of money. The statistic that has struck me most recently was that a generation ago, the chief executive of an average company earned nine times the wage of his workers. Today, he’d expect that to be 100 times. It seems only fair, if fair isn’t a word that’s lost all meaning, that they should have to jump from 100 floors higher up than the rest of us. Maybe I will do the gig, and stick a fiver in the CEO’s top pocket and tell him to treat himself to a mortgage.

Catering is one of the industries that is particularly susceptible to the vagaries of bankers’ greed, particularly at the top end of the red-letter dining experience. The makers of canapés should also be very frightened, in small mouthfuls. But recession will be good for pizza and exotic sandwich-makers, and it’ll be good for pubs that do Lancashire hotpot, and good for the importers of woks and the writers of cookbooks.

The Square is a room that you might think was dancing on the edge of a bleak future. At any lunchtime, it’s packed with bespoke plutocrats and the minions of Mammon. I haven’t been here for a few years, but I’d been planning to come and rereview, to see how it’s getting on on a diet of sclerotic money. I took the editor. We lunch together once a year, to give him a chance to fire me, so I choose the restaurants with care. I started with a warm salad of oxtail and snails with roasted bone marrow and grilled cauliflower. That’s a mouthful that sounds incoherent. It sounds mad. What arrived was beautiful. It’s the handsomest plate I’ve been offered for ages. For the consumer, presentation is the least of the culinary arts. For your top chef, it’s often his first calling. This unlikely cluster, this frot of small-boy ingredients, came together and sang like a choir of eunuch pigs, a dish that was right on the edge of being offensive, but revealed itself to be utterly endearing, and that’s what great haute cooking should be: brave and daring, and doing outrageous things that suddenly make sense, with wit and emotion, and having it all miraculously double up as food.

After that I had a bit of steamed turbot with delirious salt-swept sea kale, and a pudding of pretty pink forced rhubarb from the brick sheds of Yorkshire. Such a memorable treat for the Victorians, and it still is today for those whose palettes aren’t made alligator thick by cash, lies and greed. It’s not cheap here: three courses from the à la carte are £65. There’s a tasting menu that, if you include the wines, comes to £140. But possibly the best value in London is the set lunch for £25.

The chef here is Phil Howard, and for my money and, actually, for yours, he’s one of the three or four best working in the country. The Square was always good, but it’s got better. It has had two Michelin stars for some time; the lunch we ate deserved three. Howard is here in the kitchen every service. He’s one of the very few top-rated chefs who actually still cooks when there isn’t someone shouting, “Quiet studio, action!” The Square should do well, despite the blessed recession. Talent and skill and an enduring fascination with your craft will always have a value beyond graphs and pie charts.

Tightened belts will be no bad thing for the hospitality business. It will remind them what hospitality actually means; it will wash away the cynicism and the sham, the cooks who flog their names and consultancies rather than sausage and mash, restaurateurs who believe that publicity is everything and then believe their own publicity, the sweaty-palmed businesses that sell a spurious, soulless sophistication on expense and rarity. I’m sounding like an Old Testament prophet. Bring on the seven lean years; enter the locusts.

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