One of the oblique ways of telling what a new place is like is to see what sort of books are in the junk shop. Cortez is a town in Colorado, between the desert canyons of the Navajo reservation and the pine mountains and aspen-fringed meadows of the high San Juans. On the thrifty shelves, along with the knackered cowboy boots, herniated belt buckles and saccharine china tchochke, there was a small selection of callously thumbed books. Most were cookbooks and maps of other places — which sums up Cortez, a push-me-pull-you of wanderlust and homeliness.

I bagged Chuck-Wagon Cooking: “An authentic collection of round-up law, cowboy humour and more than 100 old-time recipes”. The cover is a fetching photo of stew, biscuits and a .45. No well-fitted kitchen should be without one. Then there was a collection of recipes from the pinto-bean cooking contest, with classics such as pinto-bean mock chicken legs and pinto-bean fudge. And there was a book with one of those titles that makes you kick yourself for not having thought of it first: Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Jars. Isn’t that brilliant?

America has a particularly intimate relationship with proprietary processed food, and these recipes were as bizarre, touching, occasionally delicious but mostly palate-scrapingly disgusting as the States itself. How about oven-fried chicken and bananas, from the Coco Casa cream-of-coconut label? The ingredients are chicken bits, cream of coconut, lemon juice, bananas, three-quarters of a cup of melted margarine and two and a half cups of cornflakes. I’m not going to give you the method for Jell-o Artichoke Salad. You’ll just have to imagine. The Jell-o flavour is lime, naturally.

One of the best things about coming back to this bit of Colorado is that it’s home to one of the best natural cooks I’ve ever met. She’s a doctor who delivers babies for the Indians. It’s a sexist truth that chefs tend to be men, while cooks are usually women. Men make food with arrogance, vanity and enthusiasm; women with love. I know that’s a syrupy stereotype, and there are humble chefs and women who couldn’t cook a marshmallow with a blowtorch, yet the most moving and memorable things you eat will be given to you by a woman. And they’ll be free. Occasionally, they’ll prepare food that is greater than the sum of its ingredients and becomes an edible parable, a secular transubstantiation, a communion of hospitality and sustenance — not the flavour of heaven, but, far more elegiac, the taste of humanity.

Emily gave me a tomato sandwich on sliced white and an egg stuffed with coriander. She grew the tomatoes and raised the hen. It sounds so prosaically absurd, so lumpy with banal bathos, but I could barely say thank you for fear that I might sob. We taste and experience food in the part of the brain that came before language. Sometimes it is beyond words.

Later, my boy, Ali, said: “That tomato sandwich, it’s the best I’ve ever eaten. What was in it?” Tomato. “Just tomato?” Yes, and no. He gave me the “whatever” look.

Tomatoes are a feature of the menu at La Noisette on Sloane Street, London. Heritage tomatoes. These are a twinky, snobbish American marketing deal. They have heritage-tomato tastings where you sniff pulp in glasses. I’m not joking.

For the first 10 minutes, everything about La Noisette queued up to be annoying. We’d been told to dress smartly. That’s annoying. Then there was the room, which has been half a dozen swanky restaurants in as many years. So much money has been pissed up its walls that they’ve bought the cheapest cutlery and glasses. The Blonde pointed out that it had the two ingredients that told you this was fancy raised-pinky dining: carpet and morgue-chilled air-con.

The waitress brought butter and explained that it was “unsalted, with just a sprinkling of fleur de sel on top”. Instantly, I craved for her to grow a goitre the size of the Ritz, because a) I knew that everything would now come with subtitles, and b) salting unsalted butter by hand is probably the most pretentious affectation ever conceived.

Then, horror upon horror, I realised what I’d walked into — the 1980s. It was conspicuous consumption in miniature all over again. They were all here: the caste system of supervisory staff, the regimental sergeant waiters, whose job was to be silently irritated; the sommelier, who sounded like Maurice Chevalier’s whoopee cushion and who, we suspected, wore intimate jewellery. Here, too, was a menu full of surprises. (Do you remember the menu surprise? It was more 1980s than Strange Steve. The surprise was generally the price per gram.)

We took Christa D’Souza and Nick Allott. I told Nick to get a decent bottle, because I knew the food would be hellish. “Heads down for an amuse-gueule,” I hissed. And, sure enough, along came the doll’s-house leitmotif of empty “cuisine de Thatcher”: a medical shot of artichoke velouté and an absurdly fiddly thin pastry cone of three sorts of tomato: concassé, sorbet and sweet dribble.

The meal continued with impeccable 1980s pretension: foie gras with coffee and amaretto; watermelon carpaccio with goat’s-milk feta and rocket; chef’s garden surprise (an unsurprising surprise, this: baby vegetables). Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the kitchen nursery, it’s paedophile gastronomy all over again.

I started with wild trout and English peas. (When was the last time you saw trout on a menu? When you still fancied Cecil Parkinson?) “Cooked the French way,” the waitress informed me, “with bacon, onions, a little lettuce.” And a soupçon of condescension, peut-être?

My classic cuisine surprise turned out to be a veal chop, carved at the table. Nobody has cut up my cutlets since I was three. There’s also an inspirational tasting menu, of course, which is also a surprise. “Let my team and I take you on a culinary adventure, inspired by this morning’s market, or today’s mood.” The Blonde had cod with ham and squid. Nick went for Welsh lamb and the sommelier’s phone number. Pudding was champagne cheesecake — very 1980s — and a peach melba with a spun-sugar basket on top. Oh my God, I haven’t seen one of those for 20 years.

Now here’s the thing, the really big surprise — it was all brilliant. Really elegant, well made, with clear flavours that were smart, complementary and respectful of the raw material. It was the best meal for money (£45 for three courses) I’ve had in months.

Maybe the rotisserie of life has swung the 1980s round for a revival. Evita’s back, Patrick Swayze’s dancing in the West End, the government’s drowning in sleaze and discontent, there are sit-ins outside airports to stop American military planes, the country’s full of new romantics and old cynics. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this weren’t the coolest, chicest dining room in London.

Actually, I would.

LA NOISETTE

164 Sloane Street, SW1; 020 7750 5000
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-2.30pm. Dinner, Mon,-Sat, 6pm-10.30pm

5 stars Nutcracker Suite
4 stars The dog's nuts
3 stars Mixed nuts
2 stars Nuts in May
1 star Peanuts

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