127-129 Parkway, NW1; 020 7388 3344.

Lunch, Mon-Sat, midday-3pm, Sun, midday-4pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-11pm, Sun, 7pm-10pm

5 stars: comfortably off, 4 stars: comfort zone, 3 stars: comfortably numb, 2 stars: comfort break, 1 star: cold comfort

I think it’s important that we all keep positive, so I’ve decided that this column will be a happy place. A happy, smiley, look-on-the- bright-side haven of goodie-good news and cheery optimism, born out of nothing more than an innate belief in the cosmic power of babies’ laughter, crisp autumn leaves, hot chocolate and crossed fingers. Think of this little hidey-hole as a pea-green lifeboat bobbing in an ocean of tears. And as the bloated corpses of investment advisors, dog walkers, kick-boxing trainers, your friends, family and neighbours float past, we’ll sing uplifting shanties and born-again hymns. Think of me as Noël Coward at the tiller. All together now: “The Stately Homes of England, how beautifully they stand, to prove the upper classes still have the upper hand.” Sing, you chavvy wretches at the back! Remember: a sea of torment is never half empty, it’s always half full.

Our first bit of jolly news is that Gordon Ramsay Holdings was very late to file an annual report to Companies House, and they’re very, very cross indeed. Then Tom Aikens’s restaurants went into receivership, but just in the nick of time, with a deft accountant’s hand, they have popped out again, rescued by a mysterious sponsor and the management team, without ever having to close the doors. This is one clever body swerve that nutmegs all those impertinent creditors and suppliers. And then there’s Whole Foods Market, the American grocery chain that does organic, free-range, over-the-rainbow food, that came to Kensington and opened a mega moral shop, having first bought out and closed the competition. Well, dears, in their first year they lost — hold your breath — £10m. It couldn’t have happened to cuter people.

But all this is just an amuse-bouche for the really exhilaratingly good news. Now it’s still only a rumour; it’s not confirmed. They haven’t actually nailed down the recycled coffin yet, but I think we can safely say that the organic charade and marketing opportunity — the movement that started out as a cranky health fad and hippie allotment nostalgia and became a Stalinist orthodoxy, that allowed angry urban liberals who didn’t know loam from tilth to tell farmers who didn’t know Notting Hill from Bayswater how to do their business — is on life support. Not since the Black Death has so much quasi-medical health-spa science been devoted to beetroot — resulting in the sort of exploitative, chic pricing that is generally reserved for celebrity perfume. It invented the most illiberal, unegalitarian, two-tier food market. There was good, healthy Oxfordshire food, and then there was the poisonous, processed, cancerous muck that the rest of you stuffed into your toothless faces. The organic movement made food the distinction of class and privilege that it hadn’t been for a hundred years, and for that alone it should be eternally and utterly ashamed of itself. Supermarkets grasped the increased margins and bent the definitions and distinctions until they were cynical tatters and meant no more than expensive packaging and a lot of smug adjectives.

It looks like the first big casualty of tightened belts will be organic eggs. Rising commodity prices has meant that there isn’t enough home-grown organic feed to stuff down the throats of organic chickens. So they’re shipping corn from Kazakhstan, and if you think that’s not a travesty of everything organic once claimed to stand for, then you’re dafter than your yoghurt. The abysmal hypocrisy and failure of the organic movement should be a warning to all environmentalists. Rules, laws, exclusions and dogma are only useful if they facilitate change and universal wellbeing. Conviction reformers begin with an imagined nirvana and work backwards through self-serving facts and draconian instructions. They are made ridiculous by their own unmovable orthodoxy. Pragmatic reformers start with the problem, not the solution, and make it better, a chip butty at a time. The organic movement always cared more for hens than people.

Gordon Ramsay liked organics, and that should have told you everything you needed to know about them. Mind you, all the high-end chefs did. It was a gift to add a tenner to the bill. Just give some dead sheep a county and a farm name and it becomes a bit special, a bit tastier. So much about restaurants is down to atmosphere and perception. Customers are highly susceptible to the snobbery of dishes and ingredients that appear rare or special and different. But nobody ever checks. There is no way of really knowing. I don’t want to intimate for a moment that Ramsay’s ingredients aren’t exactly what he says they are, but anecdotally every cook and commis from restaurants around the globe will tell you about the emergency veg bought from a supermarket, meat hustled in from the cash and carry. Who can tell? And that’s rather the point. In the end, only an accountant can tell the difference between organic and conventional.

York & Albany is run by Gordon Ramsay Holdings, but the cook is Angela Hartnett, late of the Connaught, who isn’t cooking at her other new restaurant, Murano. I’ve been told great things about this place. It’s an attractive building that’s been turned into a small hotel, though why anyone wants to stay in Parkway, Camden, is beyond me. Inside is a very large, very empty zinc bar, all painted in this year’s festive tones of fat Turk’s wifebeater. The restaurant is a small, awkward room stuck at the back, with tables too close together, giving it that cramped, migrant-in-transit feel. I always mistrust the intentions of places whose bars are bigger than their dining rooms, like a skewed ratio of tits to hips. We sat down with the film director Nick Love and the journalist Alice BB. The menu is that now predictable stalwart: John Bull’s view of European, with a few ethnic additions, a bit like an edible Labour party conference. I started with a lamb’s tongue salad. I chose this because I had to. I had to because I’m a restaurant critic, and we’re instantly attracted to all innards. Breaded and fried tongues aren’t the nicest thing you can do with the little bleaters, but it was fine, with a lamb’s lettuce salad, though they missed the ovine joke and called it mache: a dish that was undemanding of the kitchen, and unrewarding for the customer. Nick’s artichoke salad was much better, though no more complicated, and the Blonde’s mosaic game terrine was well made but noticeably not as good as the rabbit version in Murano.

There’s a lot of fish for main courses, and I noticed an interesting red snapper with couscous and preserved lemon. Where’s your snapper from? I asked the waitress, Odessa. Pretty name, Odessa. She said she’d ask the chef, and came back and said: “The Mediterranean sea.” Really? “Yes, the Mediterranean sea.” Well, I hope the fisherman tells Guinness World Records. Snappers come from the Atlantic coast of America, and parts of the Pacific. Now I do understand why they did this: you’re in the middle of service, surrounded by flames, and some git in the dining room wants to know where his effing fish came from. “Just tell him The Sea. Tell him The Oven. Tell him The Bleedin’ Mediterranean.” But you see, restaurants started all this. The whole postcode- ingredient deal, making origin and provenance an important thing, value added, was what they did. “These aren’t just red snappers, they’re rare Mediterranean red snappers. And that’ll be £14.” If you don’t know, the correct answer is, “I don’t know.” Anyway, I didn’t have it. I had the fish stew, which wasn’t really a stew, in the sense of a collective amalgamation of ingredients that come together to make a glorious big taste that is greater than the sum of its parts. It was a polite little collection of fish bits in a French-style fumet. All good fish, nicely cooked, but again underwhelming. The best thing by far was the halibut with white bean and chorizo, and a good rice pudding. With two glasses of wine the bill was £156. Reasonable rather than amazing value, considering the room. I must say it was all a bit of a bland jog round comfort-zone ingredients and predictable combinations. And given the chef and the expectations, I really wanted something with a bit more excitement and enthusiasm, a bit more optimism, some good news.

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