Tom Ilic, 123 Queenstown Road, SW8; 020 7622 0555
Lunch, Wed-Fri noon-2.30pm, Sun noon-3.30pm. Dinner, Tue-Sat 6pm-10.30pm

5 stars: Tom and Jerry; 4 stars: Tom Tom Club; 3 stars: Tom Collins; 2 stars: Tom, Dick and Harry; 1 stars: Tomfoolery

“Do you have Asperger’s?” No, not that I’m aware of. “Oh, you must have Asperger’s.” Yes, well, perhaps just a touch. Maybe it's a cultural difference? “Here, we have very much Asperger’s in Germany.” Now that doesn’t surprise me. “Here we are now in the centre of it.” Really? Do you mind if I ask, do you have Asperger’s? “Oh, yes, I have white Asperger’s.” I had no idea it was a colour thing. “Oh, yes, here in Germany, of course. We have white with hollandaise; I think you have green, inferior Asperger’s in my opinion.”

Ah, okay. Light begins to dawn. We’re talking Spargel here. “Of course. Asperger’s. Is right in English?” Asparagus. We tend to say asparagus. “This is what I say: Asperger’s.” It is the terrible truth that conversations with Germans so often have a ghostly doppelmeaning, a sinister entendre. This was a boat captain on the Danube, and I suppose the uniform didn’t help. But just for a moment, I thought, my God, of course. Asperger’s. That would explain everything. And then, with a second thought, I remembered that Asperger’s was actually discovered by a Dr Hans Asperger, an Austrian, in 1944. Five years too late, mate. He noticed that some of the children in his clinic behaved, as he put it, like “little professors”. They lacked nonverbal skills and failed to demonstrate empathy.

Well, of course, the immediate question is, how on earth could he tell? This isn’t so much a diagnosis as a national characteristic. Even today, I’m told, some Harley Street specialists ask worried mothers if the child’s father is German. Then it’s probably not Asperger’s, it’s simply Prussian, and he will grow into it. And before the po-faced legion of Asperger’s sufferers or survivors write in to complain that I have no understanding and lack sympathy, well, right back at you, sunshine. It’s a joke. Ask your mum what they are. And if you’re a German/Austrian, about to write gothic and complain: ditto. Ask your mum — she’s the one chained to the radiator, suckling your daughter.

Sadly, I have had to revise my comfortable Barnes Wallis prejudice about the Krauts. I had never been to the south before. Bavaria in the Black Forest. Beautiful. Beautifully beautiful. Memorable like the Cotswolds, but with culture, intelligence, history, purpose, morality, pride and gemütlich hospitality. So actually, not at all like the Cotswolds. I was told at a dinner (12 fun ways with asparagus) that the Swabians, who I was apparently surrounded by, were often said to be the Scots of Germany. You mean brave, independent, silver-tongued, gregarious and romantic? All looked blank. “No, mean. We Swabians are very careful with money. And are thick-skinned. What do you think the national characteristics of Germany are?”

Oh, where to start? You have no sense of humour. “No sense of humour?” my host looked shocked. “You can’t be serious.” You can only be serious. “But we have many fine jokes. We laugh constantly.” At what? There was a pause, and then a man with a laughable beard said: “John Cleese in Clockwatching.” I rest my case. “Really, we are very, very funny.” Tell me a German joke then. Now, I’m not making this up. This is verbatim. A young lady coughed and then declaimed rather loudly: “Vat is the difference between a coffee machine and a, how you say, ‘sir’, lord?” I don’t know, what is the difference between a coffee machine and a lord? “You can get the chalk out of a coffee machine.” The table rocked with Teutonic hilarity. They slapped their thighs and wiped ecstatic tears from their eyes. It was game, set and match. A hole in one. The blitzkrieg joke. And then they regarded my Asperger’s face. “You understand, no? The chalk in hard water, it gets in the coffee machine, okay? And there is an expression in German, about snob people having chalk in their heads. You see now. Funny. So, Mr Ha Ha Bean Englishman, tell us one of your oh-so-amusing jokes.” Well, the BMW I rented at Stuttgart: there seems to be something wrong with the satnav. It keeps trying to make me drive to Poland, shouting: “Schnell, schnell.” Blank incomprehension. “Well, you should probably get them to give you another one. Poland is lovely at this time of year. You want dessert? The Kaiser Schmarrn is a German speciality.”

Tom Ilic has eponymised his restaurant on Queenstown Road in Wandsworth. It’s an unpromising stretch of south London; a semi-house-trained parade of last-minute shops and can’t-be-fagged-to-cook restaurants. There ought to be a blue plaque here; there ought to be a statue and a triumphal arch, because this is where the renaissance of English food began. Of course, everyone has a slightly different story, but mine is the best one. There was Alastair Little on Frith Street, Pierre Koffmann on Royal Hospital Road, and here, on Queenstown Road, there was Chez Nico, and Christian Delteil at L’Arlequin. Just down the road, there is Marco at Harvey’s. They, all together, were the tipping point, the critical mass that propelled public eating out of grey lumps and froggy bum-lick pretension into the new.

Ilic is where L’Arlequin was. I remember coming here for the first time. I booked months in advance; I was on the dole. I must have borrowed the money. It was miraculous. Smart, warm, elegant, nouvelle (still a wilfully mocked and misunderstood but brilliant movement). I remember one dish, a bowl of kidneys with bay, the scent of laurel so strong and confident and, appropriately, the smell of victory. But Ilic is not Delteil; this is not L’Arlequin. The comparison is unfair. This is a perfectly decent local restaurant, decorated with economy and practicality, rather than flair and comfort. It was full of people who had walked here, a lot of them with sticks. It is nice to see older couples eating out. London’s restaurants are so relentlessly youthful and expensive.

I have always thought that a civilised city would give pensioners a free meal in a restaurant once a week and that all dining rooms should offer them discounts.

The menu is modern English: worthy rather than exciting, which is perhaps right for this neck of the outer limits. We started with a very well-made foie gras, an ingredient that is now so ubiquitous, I have almost stopped eating it. It is a contrary green truth that just as there are concerted efforts to ban the stuff, every chef puts it on the menu, we all get blasé, stop ordering it and the goose farmers move on to frog’s legs. The same thing has happened to caviar. Fewer and fewer sturgeon have, perversely, led to more and more sturgeon eggs on menus, and I now push them to the side of my plate.

For the main course, I had the rabbit, which came as a very well-made sausage of bunny with bits — admirable, rather than lovable. Best was the Blonde’s lamb two ways, in the modern two ways: a blob of slow-cooked and unctuous, and a lozenge of pink and chewy. Pudding was an individual round of cheesecake and a very tart tart of lemony lemon.

Ilic is a good cook. His food is precise, well sourced, prettily offered. It did everything you could have asked of it, with an honest goodness, and it bored me to tears. There are plenty of critics who rave about this dining room, who rightfully laud the chef, but it just hasn’t got that ingredient that doesn’t come off the shelf from farmers’ markets or specialist importers, that thing that lifts cooking of this technical ability into something memorable. This is a karaoke menu: really good cover versions of popular hits, which I’m sure is perfect for Wandsworth, and, after all, it’s how revolutions settle into being national gemütlich cuisines. It’s just that I don’t like gemütlich. I’m more of a Maoist epicurean — I yearn for constant revolution. I don’t want Gordon’s froth to become the orthodoxy: let a thousand flowers bloom. Ilic is quite good value at 80-odd quid for two, but I want to go out and blow the housing benefit on excitement. This just doesn’t smell like victory.

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