36-37 Greenhill Rents, Cowcross Street, EC1; 020 7017 1930

Lunch, Mon-Fri, Sun, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-11pm

5 stars: Karate chop; 4 stars: Chop off the old block; 3 stars: Chop, chop; 2 stars: For the chop; 1 star: Little chop of horrors

“Look at this, Dad. You’ll like this.” Generally, when Ally, my eldest son, tells me to look at something I’ll like, it’s a 30-second phone film of someone getting very angry, falling over and being crapped on by a horse. Or it’s a dancing mongoose, or a drunk Australian naked bungee-jumping. YouTube has all the properties of a Dark Ages bestiary. It intimates a distant world of bizarre and inexplicable otherness, proving we live in a fearsomely weird and magic place full of talking dogs, men who use their oversized feet as umbrellas, women who breast-feed rabbits and the fanatical personal rants of messianic bedroom hermits. It’s the electric-light Herodotus, and I rather enjoy it, if I’m being led by a 15-year-old. It seems to confirm a personal aperçu: the more information you have, the less you understand.

It wasn’t YouTube, as it happens. This now becomes a cautionary tale, a parable about fluttering hubris and stumbling nemesis. He’d discovered a website called simply, and elegantly, aagillisgod. I was rather taken aback, because it raised some tricky theological and metaphysical questions. Not least, could an all-powerful, all-seeing god be unaware of his own divinity? And there was, I will admit, a small swelling of the ego, a semi-tumescence in the wrinkled vanity. I smirked and harrumphed (“How ridiculous. Don’t people have better things to do with their time?”), simultaneously elbowing him away from the screen, tutting loudly. The first entry read: “I love AA Gill because he writes just like Jeremy Clarkson, but about food. How brilliant is that?” Thwack! I was slapped in the face by the wet haddock of get-over-yourself. That turned out to be the shortest religious experience since Salman Rushdie converted to Islam.

Yesterday, I had lunch with Jeremy and I told him about the website and the quote. “That’s fantastic. I’m going to write about that.” No – it’s my website. I’m going to write about it. “I’ve five columns to do after lunch, so I’m afraid I’m having it,” he said, like Napoleon reviewing regiments. Look, I’m the one who’s God. It’s mine. He’s got a new book out. I say new in the sense that undertakers say new: old stuff in a new box. If they want a quote for the cover, they can have: “AA God says Clarkson’s brilliant, and writes just like AA Gill, but sadly about cars.”

Just to continue with the too-big-for-your-own-clogs theme, I won an award a couple of weeks back. Another award, actually. I know I won it because I read about it in the paper. This paper. AA Gill wins the Edgar Wallace award for fine writing. There is something vaguely Barbara Cartland, something raised-pinky and lavender-notepaper, about fine writing when applied to a by-the-yard hack. Never mind. I was thrilled, and I’m still waiting for the bunch, the call, even the e-mail with a smiley face attachment from the paper saying congratulations. Nothing. No summons for drinks with the editor. If I hadn’t paid to read my own newspaper, I’d never have known. (Actually, I would. I saw the editor at Jeremy’s book launch. He said: “Are you AA Gill?” Yes, sir. “Well, would you come and collect your trophy thing? It’s cluttering up the office.” You see, that’s what I like about newspapers. They’re half rugby club, half Counter-Reformation.)

I wasn’t here for the gong, but in Washington having lunch in a place they said was where everybody who was somebody met anybody who was somebody else. The maître d’ sidled up and said conspiratorially: “Ah, Mr Gill. I hope you’re not going to write bad things about us.” Hot diggety damn! How on earth do you know who I am? “I read you every week on the web.” Not on AA Gill is God by any chance? “No.” He looked confused. “The Sunday Times.” I was impressed. I’m impressed, I said. “You’re a celebrity,” he replied, with a fathomless tone of pity and distaste, like a doctor who has to say: “It’s not fatal, but it is debilitating, tasteless, antisocial, and incurable.” So if you’re in Washington, eat lunch at Cafe Milano. Say I sent you. Actually, it’s not at all bad.

So, that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about what Mark Hix thinks about me. Mark, erstwhile kitchen foreman of Caprice Holdings, now executive consultant for Brown’s Hotel and master of his own oven at Hix Oyster & Chop House, thinks I’m a brat. When I reviewed Brown’s Hotel recently, I said authoritatively that I had had Irish stew, when in fact it had been Lancashire hotpot. Or vice versa. There are a number of things – like Perry Como and Engelbert Humperdinck, Schiller and Goethe, transformers and transponders, Saturn and Venus, Walloon and Flem, front and back bottom – I can never remember which is which. It is, of course, unforgivable in a restaurant review to mix and confuse two classic dishes, especially when the recipe for one is lamb, potatoes, onion, carrot, thyme, salt, pepper and water, and for the other lamb, potatoes, onion, carrot, thyme, salt, pepper and water. Mark has been teasing me relentlessly, so I thought I’d pay his new restaurant a professional visit.

It is new, in the way that Jeremy’s next article will be new, and near Smithfield. And, just to show there are no hard feelings, I took Pat Nurse, my Australian editor and one of the judges for best restaurant in the world, and Camellia Panjabi, author of the bestselling Indian cookbook ever written and owner of a dozen Indian restaurants, including Amaya and the Masala Zone chain.

The restaurant is perfectly nice to look at, with tiles and a bar, simple furniture and no volume control. We started with a plate of oysters just outside the last “r” of spring – so sort of sping. The fines de claires were fit only for stewing, and the natives were too small, like eating otter bollocks. Then we had some of Mark’s home-smoked salmon, which cuts like gravadlax and has the soft, toothless texture of lox. It was strongly smoked and tasted of Lloyd’s lightning (insurance-inspired arson). It isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I had a lamb curry to amuse Camellia; sadly, she very seriously said she thought it was extremely well made, and that it tasted very good. Grudgingly, I had to admit that was true. But it was also innocent of any chilli heat.

There were some good steaks, which came to the table naked, just so we could abuse them before they were burnt. And the star dish, a steak and oyster pie, was worth the trip on its own. There were homemade English cheeses, which varied as much as homemade pullovers. Mrs Somebody’s mouldy-sock curd was disgusting, but the chèvre supplied by Alex James – who sometimes stands in for this column, and everybody else’s – was really very good indeed. Pudding was the usual Beatrix Potter melange. The restaurant was bursting. In fact, Smithfield is hotching with young people, all apparently having speed sex up against windows, which looks a bit like mutual texting. It’s all rather jolly.

The food at Oyster & Chops is well-meaning and, generally, slightly overcooked and a touch underseasoned. The service is pleasant if you can catch it, but a bit like fishing in the Thames: mostly happening somewhere else. All the found ingredients are nicely sourced; the atmosphere is deafening with the happy noise of precoital youth.

My faint caveat to the Falstaffian, jolly, tummy-tapping heartiness of it is that, having waited 20 years for a revival in indigenous cooking, I’m beginning to suffer the Irish-stew-and-Lancashire-hotpot delusion: it’s all getting to look, sound and taste the same. It’s a good noddle, but I do wish the menus would brave something more than the well-thumbed pages of Jane Grigson. I’d like a carpet occasionally, and a seat with a cushion. I wouldn’t mind a tablecloth, and a waiter who wasn’t auditioning for an attendant lord in Henry IV Part 2. I’m beginning to be irked by the John Bullish orthodoxy that’s grown up around particular cuts and bits of offal and pollack and things on toast and things in white pots that have been steamed. It’s all fine, but I want slightly less jingoism and slightly more variation. A bit less Land of Hope and Glory, a bit more food. It’s just a thought.

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