Lunch, daily, noon-2.15pm; dinner, daily, 6pm-10pm

020 7361 1988

5 stars: Par excellence; 4 stars: No mean feat; 3 stars Joe average; 2 stars: Normal for Norfolk; 1 star: Bloody typical

The Blonde’s a pretty mediocre driver. I realise that committing that sentence to print and two million breakfast tables risks the crotches of all my suits, so I warned her. “Don’t you dare. I’m a very good driver. A very, very good driver. Anyway, how would you know, because you’re a crap driver. You drive like a frightened hat stand.” A what? “If you say I’m mediocre, I’ll tell everyone that Jeremy said you were the only person he’d ever seen for whom traffic lights came as a surprise. The only person who has to look at their knob end to change gear. You leave my driving out of your sordid, whingeing little column or I’ll park on your head.”

The reason I know that the Blonde is a bad driver is that I’m worse. The whole business of propelling a ton of metal faster than a speeding cow inches away from other cars, bikes, pedestrians, pushchairs, small dogs and pigeons terrifies me. I’m a terrified bad driver, which actually makes me an exceptional driver, because I’m one of the few who knows it.

You may have noticed that there’s an elite minority of people talking about Lake Wobegon syndrome at the moment. Lake Wobegon, as invented by Garrison Keillor, is an imaginary Minnesotan town where the women are all strong, the men all handsome and the children all above average. The syndrome is the belief that you’re above average. A study in Scandinavia has discovered that drivers in particular all rated themselves better than average, especially the ones who had been convicted of causing accidents. Ask yourself: are you better than average in bed? Do you think you’re more intuitive than most people? Do you have an especially fine sense of humour? Are you a particularly astute judge of character? Do you have very good taste? If you answered yes to all of these things, then you are very average, because everybody thinks they’re all brilliant at all of them.

Here’s the truth: you’re probably not intuitive enough to realise that you have no intuition. You’re too humourless to understand that you have no sense of humour. (Laughing at Little Britain doesn’t count.) You can’t judge character for the same reason you can’t intuit. And, even though you’re as lascivious as a gross of frogs in a bucket of E, you have always been rubbish in bed.

It’s now widely understood that all work self-assessment, so fashionable in the 1990s, is worthless, because you all have an unfeasibly inflated belief in your own ability. In fact, there is an equation that proves the more rubbish you are at your job, the higher you’re likely to rate your capability. So, all of those twits who say “My only character flaw is that occasionally I don’t know when to give up” have spectacularly poor judgment. Another study, from the University of Nantwich, revealed that 64% of people thought they would win a pub fight, 80% knew they would have been a survivor on the Titanic, 74% who had never tried it considered themselves potentially expert skiers, 90% declared that if reincarnation were a fact, they would have been royalty or famous in a past life, 83% considered themselves the most popular person on a crowded bus, 90% believed that if humans ever developed wings, they’d be eagles, and 99% considered themselves lucky, and thought luck was a skill.

There is an opposite to Lake Wobegon syndrome, which we might call Howards Endism, where people underestimate their ability: 93% say they’re useless at public speaking (they will say it very loudly, to crowds), 79% of men said they’d be bad monks, while, strangely, 65% of women thought they were already saints. Most of you consider yourselves rotten gardeners and inept cooks, whilst most men are modest about their ability to do housework, and most women claim they can’t sew. You all say you’re impatient, and can’t queue; and nobody, but nobody, ever snores.

Here’s the point of all this. Recently, The New York Times changed its restaurant critic. The new chap was meaner with the stars than his predecessor. Restaurants have been complaining like butt-stuck pigs. They want their glittering plaudits, and it doesn’t matter if they were merely easier to get before. Numbered ratings are the bane of critics’ lives; we all hate them, because they assume that a thousand carefully chosen, nuanced words can be distilled into hieroglyphs. I’ve been told by dozens of people that they first look at the stars, and if it’s a one or a two, or a five, they’ll read on. “We really only like it when you’re proctologically inserting the clog or dribbling with gastrolust. You’ve had too many threes recently: it’s boring.”

Well, three is average. Three is what you’re most likely to find. Three is what most of us are. Three is perfectly all right. If you manage to get through life with a three, then you’re probably a credit to your family, your community and your species. Three is proof you put other people’s feelings and needs beyond your own. Average is an achievement. Extreme overachievers, the five-star folk, are an awkward necessity to society. They’re the ones who push civilisation along a few inches, but as individuals they're generally failures. You don’t want to serve next to the bloke who’s about to win the VC, or live next to one of the Three Tenors. Scott of the Antarctic was a dead father. Marco Polo was a useless neighbour. Mozart was a thankless friend, Shakespeare a lousy husband. If you want to have weeping mates at your funeral, if you want to sleep soundly, and have your snoring forgiven, if you wish to be loved, then aim for three.

This year, I’m giving up on the stars. They’ll still appear, but I’m going to let the office decide. The work experience can read the copy and say: “That sounds like a two.” The review is my opinion, based on what I ate. The stars are someone else’s, based on what I write.

Min Jiang is a Chinese restaurant in the Royal Garden Hotel. I was desperate for this to be good. I had the five stars already in my pocket. The number of edible authentic Chinese in London is dwindling alarmingly. Outside the hotel, there were lines of riot policemen on horses. Hello, I thought, this is a step up from the three sulky girls at a lectern. But they didn’t want to check my reservation. They were here because the Israeli Embassy is, and there’d been a demonstration. I come to this hotel twice a week. The Blonde and I do Pilates here. She says couples who exercise together stay together; I say that Pilates is middle-aged sex. She says she’s very good at it. She also says I’m dreadful.

The restaurant is on the 10th floor, with — they promise — a blinding view over the park. Not at night, it isn’t. At night, the view is your reflection, squinting, going: “Do you think that’s the park out there?” We took Esther Walker, a marvellous writer, who’s authoring a book called How to Be a Grown-Up, and her boyfriend, Giles, who’s plainly research.

The room looks smart enough, with plenty of this season’s chic decorative motif: ornamental pots. Their speciality is crispy duck, which you have to order when you book. It was brought on looking like the George Hamilton of duck, and was carved at the table by a chef in a white hat. Sadly, it tasted like the George Hamilton of duck: bland, running to fat and about as crisp as a suede thong. I’m just going to get this over and done with. The food was many plates of disappointment: slight, timid, bland, tepid, underseasoned and cooked without conviction or appetite, but with the apparent desire to offend as few people as possible. It was, in short, international hotel catering at its most typical, a perfectly average Chinese at inflated hotel prices. And here’s the thing: I don’t want my chefs to be perfect threes. I don’t care if they’re happy. I want my food to be made by people who are social disasters, who have nervous diseases, who are absent fathers, neglectful husbands, friendless, smelly obsessives, who can think of nothing but doing unfeasibly brilliant things to a prawn, who lie awake at night sweating and miserably fretting over that extra star.

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