Restaurant review: AA Gill at the Connaught

5 stars: Coffee ceremony 4 stars: Wake up and smell the coffee 3 stars: Coffee and TV 2 stars: Instant coffee 1 star: Coffee dregs

The thrusting, ahead-of-the-curve, right-back-atcha, 24/7/31/12 geezers whose jobs it is to promote that little tablet of connectivity and one-touch-upmanship, the BlackBerry, have, right out of left-field, under the radar and out of a clear blue sky, offered me my very own, top-of-the-range world in your pocket, in exchange for a short missive of enthusiasm and a list of my favourite places. I'm asked surprisingly often for a list of my favourite places. It seems a random and useless topography, but people seem to want it, to compile, I guess, greater lists of not very famous people's favourite places, which in turn can be correlated and categorised and compared to the lists of forgotten famous people's favourite places. Then you'll be able to tap your BlackBerry and say to an enthralled and moist date: “Would you look at that? Venice is up two places in the list of favourite places from people we've never heard of.” I can barely resist the impulse to reply: “My favourite place is your wife's back bottom.”

Really, a dyslexic hack is the last person to whom you want to proffer a toy typing box. I spend all day arranging words into glittering mosaics. The last thing I want to do is pick at a BlackBerry to say: “AA is chillin in the PM with m8s.” The BlackBerry is a big kid's John Bull printing set. And if you don't remember what a John Bull printing set is, you've probably already got a BlackBerry. They're for amateurs. If your ideas run into the sand after 12 truncated words, then tap on. If you've got anything slightly more nuanced, complex and discursive to say, then a BlackBerry is a referee's whistle in place of an orchestra. Like so much electronics masquerading as aesthetics and culture, it says precisely the opposite of what you think it says about you. Like the no-hands mobile-phone earpieces that were, for a second, so very, very de rigueur - now, don't they just scream Nigerian minicab driver? And BlackBerrys: you don't see one lying on the table and think, mmmm, master of the universe, great big swinging polymath, you just think PR. It's not that you have access to the world markets, maps, facts, pop and porn, it's that the world has access to you, and can yank your chain 24/7/31/12. If BlackBerry wants a quote, it's welcome to: “AA Gill says, is that a BlackBerry in your pocket or a very small penis?” Or: “Is that a BlackBerry in your pocket and a very small penis?”

BlackBerry's too silent for the hushed, panelled reawakening at the Connaught, which used to be called the Coburg before we went to war with Germany. They've managed to keep the distinctive smell of stiff upper Sodom and Gomorrah. Now that Angela Hartnett has departed for greener pastures and the dining room has been liberated from the chains of Ramsay, it has reverted to being the boardroom of gourmandism, with an haute French kitchen. The walls are dark, the lights turgid, the staff legion. There are chairs that are too heavy for a single human to move - if you want the toilet, you have to put up your hand and wait for two waiters to lift you out. And there are two sorts of butter. I can't believe there are two sorts of butter. Both hewn from massive tumbrels that must account for the daily churnings of Luxembourg. The waiter brought them over and pointed out that this was salt, and this was ne pas salt, then added the aide-mémoire of a few grains of salt to the salty one, just in case we couldn't believe our own tongues. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if he'd added that the salt had been shaved from the pudendum of Lot's wife.

Then there are the pre-hors d'oeuvres, the amuse-bouches, the little cheese-puffy surprises and chef's gifts. Before you start, it's like being a judge at a gay dwarves' village fête. I really mind being given stuff I haven't ordered. It implies I don't know how to feed myself, or that the cook knows best, or that the kitchen is some needy child that insists you taste what it made at school today. And all of it comes with explanations and incoherently accented English, so any conversation you might be having is incessantly interrupted by lists of adjectived ingredients that are obviously more interesting than anything I have to say. And the sommelier is like grape Popbitch.

The Blonde and I started with little, tiddly, piddly glasses of foie gras crème brûlée, apple sorbet and peanut emulsion. Cat food, horse spit and monkey poo. Then a consommé of plainly cooked vegetables with herbs, mussels and thai basil that was, contrapuntally, simple, elegant, clever, clean and delicious. And on to a black fish jelly, in which was suspended oyster tartare with a mound of caviar and a velouté of haricot beans, that was nothing less than sublime. Even without an “r” in the month, or an “r” in the mouth of any of the waiters, the globular fishiness still sang sea shanties on the way down past my epiglottis, and the farinaceous beans were an earthy landfall.

On, on, to roast chicken. Sometimes I think that the whole point of French cuisine, the sole purpose of the 400-year ascent of diminishing returns, was simply to arrive at a perfect roast chicken. Indeed, it may be the only point of the French. This poulet jeune, from Bresse, poached in wine, with girolles stuffed under its silken skin, served with Swiss chard, gently gratinated with beaufort cheese, was as good a coq as I've had in this country. What the Chinese do to ducks, the French do to chickens.

There followed more bits of unwanted, unasked-for mouthfuls of culinary Tourette's, then a chocolate ganache from Madagascar, with raspberry sorbet and a galangal brûlée. Intense, salacious and rude. A hit of cocoa that was the elegant, organic, sweetie version of Rohypnol in the mouthwash. More petits fours and chocolates and goodie bags arrived, with their faltering interruptions. I asked for coffee, and they in turn asked me what sort and where from and how old. At this point, I gave up. I really don't have an opinion on whose house my coffee comes from. Let me choose, the waitress said, as if I'd given her two quid for the condom machine. Then she added something like, we recommend you don't take sugar, because it interferes with the musky top notes and the spicy motifs. It was coffee. It was fine.

The Blonde and I continued to talk, trying to catch up on the conversation that we had lost track of somewhere behind the third amuse-bouche. I asked for another coffee and the waitress began explaining again that she would be happy to bring me a different bean, from a new, dewy, moist-girt plantation in some distant, strife-wrought Third World Hades, where the locals live only to pray for antiretrovirals and grow after-dinner espresso for the delectation of the customers at the Connaught. It came, I drank it, then, annoyingly, I had to eat my words - which I didn't order either. The coffee was very different, and in exactly the Frenchly, richly embarrassing way she said it would be. And here's the point. This sort of food is all about the infinite improvements of scale, about the minute differences between things that most of us spend most of our lives saying, “Oh, I can't be bothered”, or “That'll do”. And it's our loss. That's the real point of this restaurant: the food, for the most part, is accomplished, crafted to an exacting standard, using ingredients of a quality and finesse you rarely find outside of kitchens where price is never going to be a criterion. This is the sort of French food that got those of us who care too much about food into caring about food in the first place. Nobody else in the world can be bothered to go to these lengths for dinner.

So, what's a restaurant like this for? I couldn't say. I don't know anyone who wants to eat like this, who would put up with the stress and the interruptions and the business and the fawning and the constant attention; the information, the formality and the rictus politeness. This was a 50-thank-yous dinner. It's grand, nostalgic, arrogant, laughable, laudable and impossibly awkward. Dinner that has lost its way. Grand hotels are the refugee camps for French haute cuisine. If you were thinking of giving to Oxfam, perhaps you might consider eating at the Connaught instead.

The Connaught
Carlos Place, W1; 020 3147 7200
Mon-Fri: lunch, noon-2.30pm; dinner, 6.30pm-10.30pm