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It was Jonathan Swift who pointed out that it must have been a bold man that first ate an oyster. He also said that every dog must have his day. I love Swift. I love him in the unrequited, obsessively barmy way that you love dead men in wigs. The dean is the patron and pin-up of all columnists. He just was the very, very best. It was he who perfected the Juvenalian satire into English, but with a particularly delicious Irish turn of syntax. The point about the oyster is that it’s the idiocy of an experiment and an adventure. It’s the greatest fools who sometimes make the most divine discoveries. Swift asked, I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing? I always thought the oyster aperçu was not as smart as the snog. That’s on the satirical button.

The thing about eating oysters is that there wasn’t a first man who did it. We evolved into doing it. Kissing, on the other hand — or on the other cheek — was first done by some old roué who said: “Come here behind the arras, my dear; let me show you my new discovery. Now, close your eyes...”

It’s not oysters that were the big foolish mouth-adventure for mankind; the real idiot was the first man to eat a well-done steak. We are so familiar and comfortable with cooked food, we can barely comprehend how strange it must have tasted. Nobody has the faintest idea when the first steak was grilled; actually, a lot of people have faint ideas, and they range from 10,000 to 2.5m years ago. But imagine, all you’ve ever eaten is raw meat. Burnt meat must have been truly disgusting. Everything about it is alien. The temperature, the texture and the taste. Our palates are a combination of acquired instinct (poisons taste bitter, mother’s milk is sweet) and learnt cultural and aesthetic prejudice (the Chinese don’t drink milk, Jews won’t eat pork, everyone in peep-toe heels likes champagne).

So, burnt meat won’t have been a eureka moment, but the benefits of cooked meat aren’t about aesthetics. Nicety follows necessity. If you roast your meat, it’s easier and faster to eat. You can consume more, and this is all-important for little naked men who are competing with a host of predators and scavengers that come with integral butchery sets. Cooked meat allowed us to absorb the protein we needed to make big brains and come up with other good ideas after flame-grilled sirloin. So, after 2.5m or 10,000 years, some evolved bod thought it would be a bright idea to be a vegetarian. And then, a few years later, Paul McCartney suggested that we should all be vegetarian on Mondays, because there are too many cows, pigs, chickens and sheep, all farting into the greenhouse. You’d think that if there were too many cud-munchers, perhaps we ought to eat more of them, have carnivore blowout weekends, for the sake of global warming, but perhaps this isn’t thinking the problem through in a Swiftian way. There are too many farty cows because there are too many farty people wanting to be fed. The answer surely is not to eat the cows, but rather eat the people.

Now, before you reach for the green ink, I know there is a problem with eating people. Eating people is wrong. It’s wrong because people are carnivores, and we don’t eat carnivores. The rule is, not more than two steps from the sun: plants eat sunlight, sheep eat plants, we eat sheep. We don’t eat wolves, lions, eagles, or dogs and cats unless we have to. But — and here I can tell you’re ahead of me — we could eat vegetarians. As part of a balanced approach to environmental apocalypse, we could have vegetarian Mondays. It would be an easy way to cull some of the most annoyingly sanctimonious and whingeingly pitiful people in the world, while doing good at the same time. Two vegans with one stone. And I expect they taste rather good, being compulsively vain hypochondriacs. Vegetarian Mondays is a damn good idea. Thank you, Sir Paul. Or the Big Macca, as we’ll have to call you.

So, it’s a steakhouse this week: The Palm, where Marco’s Drones used to be. A good spot for a restaurant. Big rooms, a decent bar, close to a lot of very expensive shops and very, very expensive houses. The Palm isn’t just any old steak joint: it’s a much chewed-over American institution transported to London. If you haven’t been to an American steakhouse in America, it’s difficult to explain how deeply and neurotically attached Yankee men can become to the providers of meat on plates.

Every city has its chop shop, which will have a darkish, clubbable, robber-baron feel. There will inevitably be a maître d’ of great age who is so oleaginous that if he lay on a beach, he’d count as pollution. The waiters will be psychotically annoyed old men in long white aprons; the steaks will be huge, black and pink, and unnaturally soft and saliva-y. The worship of meat in these places is akin to that at Ukrainian lap-dancing auditions. They use words such as heritage, venerable and timeless. They all have one thing in common: a childish fondness for cartoons and caricatures. The walls will be covered with pictures of small bodies and big heads.

The first thing you notice about The Palm is that it has more caricatures than customers. The faces of smiley deranged strangers have been painted all over the walls. It’s a bit like sitting in an exhibition by the neocon answer to Banksy. Apart from that, the room works quite well. It has the authentic American thing of not knowing how relaxed or how formal to be, so it counts as both. The staff have been imported; they, too, are prime and gently aged. The menu is authentically Yankee — that is, a list of a dozen things to do with a dead cow, and crustaceans. The waiters are drilled like marines on the CVs of the ingredients and the methods of torturing them. We were told that the shrimp (prawn) dishes were all off, because the prawns had been refused entry visas for not being American enough. The lobsters, though, were American enough, which is a shame, because Scottish lobsters tend to have fatter tails and sweeter meat.

The Blonde and I took James and Stash Baker, and Jeremy Clarkson. Out of the plethora of starters, it was the crab cakes that stuck in the throat. They’re always a disappointment. They came with a series of dips, which tasted of an awful lot, all of it vile. The steaks are offered to you with a lot of unnecessary qualifications: their age, weight, place of birth. I really want the kitchen to sort out all of that. My choice between an 18oz, 27-day red poll from Dorset, as opposed to a 15oz, 30-day Welsh black from Glamorgan, is nothing more than a coin-toss guess. It’s the sort of information that gives you the illusion of expertise, sophistication and taste, when actually it’s as meaningless as the adjectives on a holiday brochure. Meat varies from carcass to carcass far more than it does from Monday to Wednesday or Devizes to Caerphilly.

All that aside, I do love American steak. I like its graininess and its dribbly incontinence. What we got was drearily disappointing. The chips were flabby and schoolish, the side orders un-Americanly mean and insipid, the famous onion rings were soggy and tasted of batter and not much allium. And, most important, the steaks themselves turned out to be bland, tough and miserably parched.

Jeremy, who irrationally hates America, but just as irrationally loves so many American things, pulled a face and tentatively said: “This isn’t very good, is it?” Food is the only thing he mentions with a tentative face. This is because he can’t tell the difference between caviar and bubble wrap, and is almost always wrong. But here, he was right, and annoyingly we had to agree with him. Everything was badly underseasoned: salt starvation is another American fad, and it shows a culinary loss of nerve. Seasoning shouldn’t be left to the customer; things cooked with salt are not the same as cooked things with added salt. Even though the steaks couldn’t manage it, the bill was very bullish: somewhere around the £500 mark for a modest amount to drink and a couple of extra side orders. Way too much for this place, this food and the competition. This is not a good review, but I have the feeling that The Palm could do better, with more care and less conviction.

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