St James’s Hotel & Club, 7-8 Park Place, SW1; 020 7316 1614. Book a table at Andaman

Lunch, midday-2pm; dinner, 7pm-10pm

5 stars: Superstar, 4 stars: Telstar, 3 stars: Ringo Starr, 2 stars: Freddie Starr, 1 star: Death Star

It’s gastro guidebook season. They come every year, between gull’s eggs and oysters, as welcome and as useful as a McDonald’s burp, stoking up their sorry controversies and manufactured little shocks to garner some publicity. This usually means trashing a chef off the telly. And it reminds us that a restaurant guide’s job is not to sell restaurants, but to sell restaurant guidebooks.

The two main London offerings, Zagat and Harden’s, are only of any use for finding phone numbers. Harden’s is particularly pointless, with its pox of inverted commas, words plucked from “discerning” readers’ “considered” reviews. Here’s a random example from a dining room I’ve never been to, The Landmark Winter Garden in NW1: “An ‘impressive’ atrium provides the ‘stunning’ setting for dining at this Marylebone hotel; prices can seem ‘outrageous’, but the place is still nominated for ‘peaceful’ business meals or for the ‘memorable Sunday champagne brunch’.” Do we want to go there, do you think? Are all these adjectives ironic, cynical or merely suburban kitsch? I must say, “memorable Sunday champagne brunch” is choice. Exclusively choice. I think it’s safe to say that this discerning “epicurean” would rather have his mouth used as a scabrous urban fox’s dirt box than partake of a memorable champagne brunch.

Guides are a curse and a bane on hospitality. The randomly solicited offerings from people whose qualifications are the ability to chew and the profligate use of exclamation marks are based on the false premise that everyone has an opinion, and all opinions are equally valuable. “Just a matter of opinion” doesn’t make an argument an equitable draw. Some people’s are worth more than other’s. Mine’s worth more than Harden’s. Some people are right, and everyone else isn’t. If that’s not the truth, then the whole western canon of civilisation is a fraud and a lottery. Would you pick five random people from a bus queue and let them decorate your bedroom, dress you or choose your next holiday? Then why on earth would you trust them to feed you?

Let me tell you: the opinions of the sort of people who’ve got the time and inclination to write to papers and publishers simply for the pleasure of the sound of their own pursed and sanctimonious prose are a peculiarly weird and onanistically myopic little troop.

If the amateur compilations are useless, then the professionally compiled ones are worse. The life of a secret guide eater is one of unspeakably Beckettesque misery, a meagrely remunerated peripatetic life of tables for one, fingered mantles and sniffed toilets, half bottles and discreet notebooks. It is as far from being a normal and enjoyable night out as is possible. Life is a series of condemned-man last meals. The Michelin Guide has had a more dispiriting consequence for gastronomy than any other foodie thing, including microwaves and Gary Rhodes. The star system has created exactly the opposite effect of the one intended. It has encouraged restaurant food to be snobby, twee, hagiographic, meritlessly elitist, uncomfortable and bereft of any human emotion that is desirable or attractive.

The more stars, the worse they are. I’d rather eat in a two-star than a three, and better a one than a two. Does any culinary phrase or saying fill you with as much indigestible gloom as “three-starred German chef”? And now we have one all of our very own, in London. It was with a heavy bowel, and empty expectations, that I went to Andaman at the St James’s Hotel, over-cheffed by a German with a troika of astral projections. This used to be a weirdly louche and secretive club, called Le Petit Club Français, run by an incontinent, drunk old lesbian, who sat snoozing over a large ham, happily relieving herself into the carpet. The members were minor, penurious aristocracy and discreet, plummy homosexuals, at a time when all homosexuals were more or less discreet. I was a plongeur and commis chef here, and learnt the full Orwellian squalor of a pre-Conran West End kitchen. I regularly took salad out of the bin when we ran out. I remember that the whole kitchen gobbed into the vichyssoise of a pair of arch pooves who’d been rude to the waitress. I was a teenager with a bona eke and fit lallies, and regularly had beige door johnnies waiting to ply me with a little drinky-winky. I’d have to slip down the fire escape, which isn’t a euphemism. Happy days.

Now it’s a claustrophobic bijou hotel with public rooms like the compartments in a 14-year-old’s jewellery box. The walls are barnacled with appalling, sweatily erotic pictures. The Blonde and I took the publisher Dave Macmillan and the novelist Bella Pollen. We were sat in a small compartment apparently reserved for northern businessmen and their secretaries. The menu comes in two halves: one a short à la carte, the other a long cast list of amuse-bouches like a chef’s CV. This is my idea of purgatory on a plate. We ordered, and the Blonde asked if we might have a tureen of foie gras from the Teddy Bear’s Picnic menu while we waited for our first courses. After some time, and something frothy and odd in a glass, the foie gras arrived. It was well made. There was then an interregnum and, after a number of desperate requests, the starters appeared.

My tagliatelle of wild mushrooms was a French chasseur sauce that drowned some pasta so that it was more like a flat noodle soup. Nice, but wrong. A pea and mint soup was green and sweet and fresh-tasting. Carpaccio was red-raw and beefy. Everything was neat, and precise, and polite. Main courses were less of a success, as so often happens from kitchens that think two bites is a feast. The temperatures were all wrong, mostly on the chilly side of friendly. The Blonde’s cod was actually hostile. My loin of lamb was overcooked (I’d given the kitchen the option on how they wanted to serve it). This is a dull and safe little cut, expensive and bland, that suits timid cooks who don’t like to be reminded that meat ever had a life. It came with a small, sad, grey chop.

Desserts weren’t awfully inviting, or were alcoholic, so we shared a chocolate mousse. It was what you’d expect from a three-starred German. Finally the bill came. With no wine, but two martinis, it was £303.64. Not unexpected, but nonetheless a depressing shroud on an effortfully terminal evening. Bella pointed out that everything seemed to come with a foam or spume or frothy emulsion. It was, she searched for the metaphor, overwhelmingly, ecstatically frotted — every dish a happy ending. There has to be a better way for a kitchen that is plainly — or, rather, complexly — talented to deliver elegant food without the moist and creepy attention of too many waiters bearing too few dishes, the unacceptably tedious gaps between courses, the whole stuffy, overfelicitous, discommoding, awkward atmosphere of sterile bonhomie, and joyless, long-winded food that comes with the aspiration of stars and plaudits. This is a style and etiquette of eating that has been contrived by ambitious, gong-happy chefs and guides. It bypasses the pleasure of customers. No punter would ever come up with the sticky formality, and plumped discomfort, of three-star wannabe restaurants. We eat in this sort of place despite all the effort, not because of it. Yet still we have to pay for it. And that’s, frankly, “imbecilically masochistic”.

Book a table at Andaman

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