They’ve discovered a new syndrome. We love a syndrome of a Sunday, and we particularly adore this one. We want to give this one to all our friends. We want to spread it on little biscuits and have it for nibbles. We want this syndrome instead of a rabbit.

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for medical science, which has come up with Fear and Loathing of Paris syndrome, a bona fide medical condition that’s particularly bad among Orientals, we’re told. The symptoms are nausea, insomnia, twitching, nameless dread, feelings of inferiority and terror of humiliation. How they can differentiate that from just being Japanese, I can’t say.

Paris is the world’s top tourist destination. It also turns out to be the most loathed. The thought of having to face unspeakably rude Parisians and sit in restaurants where nobody bothers to serve you for hours on end reduces those who come from cultures based on deference and respect to hyperventilating tears and nosebleeds.

And what do you imagine the French think about that? They think it’s rather chic to have a disease named after them. “All of civilisation is an incurable sickness of unspeakable pain,” said an unemployed philosopher in dark glasses and a shirt with the collar turned up in an anarchic, dystopian manner. “Paris is a sexually transmitted disease,” his 17-year-old girlfriend screamed. “It’s bourgeois Aids,” she added, setting fire to her armpit.

There is a cure for Paris. One dose, and you’ll be immune to the slaughterhouse queues, industrial rémoulade, sweaty ham, clammy chips, cold coffee and insufferable snottiness of every sans-culotte in a pinny. The cure is called Rome, though there are side effects: it’s very addictive.

I took a course of Rome last weekend. No other city has been so copiously blessed. It has barely had a bad hair day in 2,000 years. There has been a bit of a decline, the odd fall, but these have only added to the astonishing gorgeousness of the Eternal City. Imagine being the first international metropolis in the daddy of empires, the premier city of the civilised world — and when that’s over, you get the bonus ball of the Renaissance, then mannerism, then operatic baroque, futurism and the only good bits of fascism.

If that weren’t enough, you also blag the headquarters of the richest, campest, most decoratively extravagant religion ever conceived. Rome won the civilisation lottery every time it bought a ticket. And, of course, it’s inhabited by Italians. Just think what Paris would be like if it had Italians instead of bloody Parisians.

The great secret of Rome is that nothing your accountant cares about works. The traffic, the taxes, the utilities — all utterly crap. You want a phone connected in Rome, you need to be a cardinal’s catamite. Only the Pope’s got broadband, and only God has WiFi. But everything that really matters works like a greased choirboy.

Food, for instance. This is the greatest city in the world to eat in — if you want to eat Italian, of course. If you want Mexican Thai tapas, it’s dreadful. I ate three meals of exemplary bliss: lunch at Nino’s (a Roman institution, friendly and hospitable, which in season offers abbacchio, the tiny newborn lamb) and Checco er Carettiere, a Jewish restaurant in the ancient ghetto — Italian-Jewish, so the ham is delicious and the little deep-fried artichokes are perfect. Best of all was the Hosteria del Pesce, which ticked every box in a wish list of things that restaurants should be. There is no secret to why Roman food is as good as it is. There’s no freemasonry of haute chefs or complex litany of sauces to memorise. It’s just decent ingredients and attention to detail. Palates are fortified with regional prejudice about everything from the grain size of rice to the sexual habits of pigs, and the belief that everything should be presented in the manner that does it greatest justice. Eating in Italy is more than pleasure or hospitality or appetite. It’s a group communion of who they are and where they come from — the transubstantiation of Italian-ness.

Rome is one of the places I go to recalibrate the critical scale. If you make judgments on one thing for a long time, slowly your taste and opinions slip, usually into equivocation and benefit-of-the-doubt compromise. Five disappointing dinners in a row can make the sixth seem not so bad. It’s difficult to notice, because the change is incremental. So, every six months or so, I need to go and eat to remind myself what’s really, eternally great.

Rome is a benchmark, not just because restaurants such as the Hosteria del Pesce effortlessly pluck all the stars I have to offer (even before the waiter said, with real disappointment, that he was going to have to give me a small discount because I hadn’t finished the salt-baked sea bass), but also because food and restaurants fit into Rome as naturally as churches and fountains. They never jar or set out to distract you with the wallpaper. They don’t have bouncers on the doors or circus acts in the kitchen. Roman food, Romans and Rome are all harmoniously part of the same thing.

So now I’m back — standards set, palate defurred, tongue sharpened on Trajan’s Column. Which, all in all, is jolly bad luck for Mews, a new restaurant in Mayfair. A week earlier, it might have got away with it.

Mews sits in a little cluster of bars behind Handel’s house. (He doesn’t live there any more.) Fashionably, the dining room is on the first floor, above a large bar. The food is supposed to be modern English. It’s a confection of stuff that comes from That’s What I Call Dinner, Volume 48. There is a distinctly antipodean lilt to a lot of it — and it’s perfectly well made. The T-bone steak was a big bit of beef. Lemon sole and a deep-fried prawn with chips was a modishly patronising take on the takeaway version. I started with a risotto of peas and little gem lettuce that had an overunctuous splodge of mascarpone added, turning it into green rice pudding, then some half-cooked tuna maki that didn’t taste of much.

There’s a nice manager, and the restaurant has an elaborately time-consuming and otiose website. If half as much energy and effort had been put into the ingredients and the food, I don’t suppose it would have made much difference. This would still be a limp, showy, derivative, tastefully Botoxed little experience.

I couldn’t help noticing over and over that the wallpaper had Oriental appliquéd butterflies stuck on by hand.

MEWS OF MAYFAIR

10-11 Lancashire Court, New Bond Street, W1; 020 7518 9388
Lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 6pm-11pm

5 stars Mewsic to our ears
4 stars Mewseum piece
3 stars Mewzak
2 stars Bad mews
1 star We are not amewsed

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