Stamford Bridge, Fulham Road, SW6; 020 7915 2929
Tue-Sat, lunch noon-2.30pm, dinner 6pm-10.30pm

5 stars: World Cup; 4 stars: Champions League; 3 stars: Premier League; 2 stars: Conference; 1 star: Grass roots

Everybody has had a go at Sicily. Sicily was the bandy-legged, unibrowed, evil-eyed, midget good time that was had by just about everyone – Greeks, Venetians, Carthaginians, Romans, Saracens, Vandals, Arabs, Spanish, Amalfians, Genoese and Edwardian homosexuals. They even got a seeing-to from legendary people – the last refugees of Troy are supposed to have settled there. The only colonists who didn’t get to stir Sicily’s polenta were the Brits. How the Royal Navy managed to miss it is a mystery.

And Sicily got the Normans. The Normans were barely house-trained Vikings with big horses – unimaginative, earthy bullies with silly pudding-bowl haircuts and mad, meaty faces. They invaded Sicily one at a time, pretending they were on holiday. Little gangs of Normans on stag nights would wander though Italy getting drunk, singing “One Magna Carta, there’s only one Magna Carta”, until they all turned up in Palermo. Then, one night, before you could say “William, you bastard”, they had laid their towels all over the prayer mat and claimed Sicily for Normandy. It was the first successful invasion by tourism and, apparently, the Sicilians were rather pleased. The Normans were atypically light-handed and liberal, and left the running of the island to the Arabs.

The great surprise for me in Sicily was the thumping beauty of Norman culture with a suntan. If what you’re used to is the Tower of London and all those surly castles, the cathedrals and palaces of Sicily come as a big shock. The church at Monreale is a revelation. Why didn’t our hunting-obsessed, rugger-bugger Normans ever do stuff like this back home? The cathedral glistens and vibrates with the most perfectly complete mosaic interior I have seen. It’s a vast hangar, God’s Terminal 5.

I’ve always found mosaic the most dismissible of visual arts – after video, obviously. It subordinates imagination to intellect, replaces intuition with a plan and, in the most fey sense, sacks artistry for craft. As I get older, though, it grows on me – or I grow into it. There is a streak of aesthetic rigour and collectivism about mosaic, the democracy of those hard little tesserae giving themselves to the greater good, no one piece more important than any other. In a parable, mosaic becomes a labour of dedication and endurance.

Sicily’s history ought to make it the poster child of multiculturalism. Sicilians should be the most easy-going, inclusive, welcoming and nonjudgmental people in the world, but what did multiculturalism give them? The mafia. Sicily is inverted, mistrustful, secretive and vengeful. It’s a great truth that where you come from, what you look like, which way you pray and how you dance count for little compared to how much you get paid. Happily, however, we don’t have to think about any of that here.

The food is strangely brilliant. Where multiculturalism failed as a sociopolitical template, it makes a very nice dinner plate. Best sandwich filling of the year? In a little bar on a pretty square, there was a man slicing anonymous lumps and throwing the bits into a vat of bubbling water. I’ll have one of whatever you’re making, I said in the international language of fast food. He grabbed a ciabatta roll, split it, daubed a thick layer of ricotta, stuffed it with a generous wodge of the boiled meat, added a sprinkle of some other cow’s cheese and handed it to me, with wedge of lemon. I inhaled the first half, as you do with things that are better than gratitude sex with a film star, then tried to make the second half last till teatime. It was the epitome of the defining characteristics of Italian food: the finest, simplest ingredients, arranged with careless panache, coming together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. We’re back to mosaics again. I asked the chap what the meat was and, in the international language of autopsies, he explained it was spleen and lung. Go ask for that in Pret A Manger.

Marco is probably the swankiest restaurant in a football ground outside Italy. Whether you think football grounds are the place for napkin dining is a question of cultural purity. There are many of you who will think football should be run on a diet of Ginsters and Wagon Wheels. You don’t want my bourgeois hegemony kidnapping the working-class spirit of the great inarticulate muddy metaphor. But Chelsea FC knows better, and has got Marco Pierre White to do the catering in what I remember was once Harry Ramsden’s. We went one wet evening. There is valet parking, which is almost worth going for on its own. The room is surprisingly elegant. I say surprisingly because I’m enough of a patronising snob to be surprised by anything in a football ground that isn’t monosyllabic, remedial, primary, lachrymose and up on a rape charge. It has been well designed by Tara Bernerd, with low lighting, nice booths – we love a bit of a booth – and a striking golden pillar of Swarovski crystal, adding that touch of oligarchic understatement. The manager asked if I supported Chelsea. Well, I live down the road; it’s been the nearest football pitch for most of my life. My son supports them, so I suppose, if I have to have a football team – and in Gordon Brown’s new, prove-you’re-a-citizen, hokey-cokey, join-in-or-f***-off Britain, you do have to have one – it’ll be Chelsea. The manager asked me in a way that implied I would get a better table and a free vodka shot if I could sing a verse of Blue Is the Colour.

The menu looks like the Ivy’s, but it’s a reprieve of Marco’s best bits. It’s like one of those dream teams the kids make up – and I got a deep stab of nostalgia. Every one of these dishes brought back priapic memories. The day Marco stopped cooking was one of my stomach’s saddest. You may have wept buckets when Peter Osgood retired. For me, it was when Marco took his finger out of the sauce. Here they all were, the back three of a clean and clear crab salad, the tireless scallops and black pudding, and a foie gras terrine as smooth and rich as Shevchenko’s agent. Then there was the midfield fish pie, slightly underseasoned, but his heart was in the right place – ie, not in the pie. Excellent liver, steak and shoulder of lamb, all made with the tight precision that was Marco’s abiding gift to anyone who worked in his kitchen – that and a couple of goes at rehab. I had the beef stovey, a sort of corned cake with an egg on top.

Ten minutes ago, Marco phoned. “How was the stovey?” I didn’t like it. “What was the matter with it?” I didn’t like it the last time I had it. I’ve never liked it. It’s too salty and mulchy, and it grabs you by the throat and won’t let go. “So, you ordered something you knew you didn’t like?” Yeah. “Why?” Because I thought I might like it this time. “But you didn’t.” No. “Well, you’ve really f***ed me, haven’t you? Why couldn’t you have had the liver and bacon?”

The rest of the customers were an odd lot. It looked like a smart restaurant in Leeds or Manchester, full of a bit dressed-up, trendy, middle-aged couples, and there was an air of quiet expectation in the room. I guess they were all married – but not to each other. There were a lot of second bottles and stickies. This must be the late transfer window.

Marco is a very good – unexpectedly good – restaurant in a football stadium, with a nice rice pudding in goal. I’m more enthusiastic now I know Chelsea play in blue and White.

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