13 Albemarle Street, W1; 020 7409 1011. Lunch, noon-3.30pm, Mon-Fri. Dinner, 6pm-11pm, Mon-Sat

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Apparently, alsatians have roaches, and the Kennel Club says they have to be rid of them. I must say, I was surprised. It wasn’t so much that the alsatians smoked cannabis: frankly, if any dog’s going to have a habit, then hanging around the chain-link fences of scrap yards and warehouses and working nights, well, obviously alsatians are going to be prone to illicit drugs. And you can’t work with security guards and the police without getting involved in a little recreational dealing. No, what surprised me was that they could roll joints. I know they’re supposed to be clever and dexterous. But then I read on, and discovered that a “roach”, in this context, is a hump or lump on an alsatian’s back. Isn’t the language fabulous? Roach definitions: 1 a coarse fish; 2 a filter on a joint (don’t confuse or conflate with gefilte fish); 3 a hunch-backed German shepherd.

Alsatian breeders have been slipping roaches into the doggy mix, along with back legs that look as if they’re permanently crouching, and the Kennel Club says they’ve got to stop, or they won’t be allowed into Crufts. Now, why anyone would want a Quasimodo dog is beyond me, but then why anyone who wasn’t a real human German shepherd, or a Hungarian border guard, would want a German shepherd is also beyond me. But the regiment of German shepherd breeders has got the roach over the Kennel Club, which they reckon is infringing on their genetic experiments to create the perfect Richard III dog. “Ve vill place ourselves under the auspices of the German German shepherd breeders’ association,” a Brit breeder said darkly. And that’s how it starts — Anschluss, starting with an alsatian fanciers’ club. Before you know it, it’ll be dobermans and dachshunds, and before you can dig an Anderson shelter, they’ll be all over Hungarian pulis, Belgian bouviers and French poodles. There will be demands for group walkies, and they will be rounding up mongrels. There’ll be calls for all right-thinking bulldogs to join in the Aryan canine brotherhood.

I’m constantly fascinated by the cautionary parable, and inbred metaphor, that is our long walk with dogs. No other creature can metamorphose as quickly, or as dramatically, as a dog to accommodate our need for heraldic symbols of self-esteem. The Kennel Club should go much further. This thing is just too important for some feeble Chamberlain paper-waggling. It needs to get teeth, and possibly pit bulls, to enforce breed purity. It’s no good going for the dogs. They’re merely symptoms of a fundamental spiritual and physical weakness that must be ruthlessly expunged. We need to take on the breeders with an iron fist. They must have no crouching back legs, no spavined hips. They must be checked for fits, mental instability and neurotic furniture-humping. The weakest must be neutered. Each year, there will be a new people’s Crufts for German shepherd owners, who will be paraded in the ring showing the correct blond colouring. They will goose-step efficiently, salute and recite Nietzsche without dribbling. They must have their bottom inspected. In time, all dog owners will compete. Pekingese people must prove that they are bass-voiced, strident women, with sensible shoes and curious hats. Pug owners must be able to mince in the accepted manner, and roll their bulbous eyes at checks worn with stripes. Those with chihuahuas must be shorn of pubic hair, and roll over at the sound of a champagne cork. Irish setters must have uncontrollable lady minders, who shout incessantly and adore Jilly Cooper. And, from now on, it will be called Nurem-Crufts.

Our choice of dog defines us. As does professing not to like dogs. The dog reveals pretension, insecurity, assumption and aspiration. It is no accident that, after much augury, Obama chose a black dog with white markings, or that the Queen went for corgis: short-arsed, plain, bad-tempered little dogs, bred for 1,000 years to herd cattle. And, in all fairness, I should disclose that I personally own a jack russell, a bitter, bellicose, unbiddable, thick-coated little bitch, who’ll bite anybody, and pick a fight with anything: motorbikes, paper bags, the Household Cavalry.

The restaurants you choose also say something about you. Dolada is in a basement by Bond Street. Until recently, it was Mosaico; before that, it was Bicce. I’ve now reviewed all three, and I realise there has been no more than a smidgen’s difference between any of them. A touch of lipstick, perhaps a slightly deeper décolleté; a cooler smile. But, essentially, it’s always been the same Italian restaurant. Which is comforting for the clientele, who, to a great extent, are Italians. Having given the world its most popular pan-glottal grub, Italians themselves are unaccountably weird about what they will and won’t put in their mouths. This restaurant, though perfectly nice, admirably accomplished, accommodating, polite, clean and roach-free, is not, in all honesty, the finest Italian restaurant in London. But, still, it maintains a loyal and greedy eyetie following. Most of them work in the art world. Art suits Italians; it’s the business that poses as culture, so they can be both aesthetic and grubbing at the same time. There’s nothing an Italian likes better than to be contradictory things at the same time. And, anyway, they think they invented art, and that nobody else really understands the stuff. They also think they invented lunch. And lunch is really when you want to go to Dolada; I could only go in the evening, and dinner is a pale echo. The Blonde and I took Laura Bailey, who is a vegetarian, and so, in Italian terms, a dead person who already sleeps with the fishes, though without eating them, and Jake Fellner, a young man who’s been doing work experience in kitchens, most recently Rowley Leigh’s. He was forensic about the food, dissecting it with an unforgiving rectitude, and was as conservatively critical as the inquisition. If he doesn’t decide to be a chef, he can always be a reviewer for the Spectator.

The chef here is a Venetian. While all the departments of Italy have their distinctive cuisine, one of the least eloquent or glossy is the lunch of the Veneto. Overshadowed by money, decadence, Austrians and the rest of the cuisine of northern Italy, at least they do make very pretty glass. And the table here has the most pleasing ones of any restaurant in London.

As for the food, I’m rather more forgiving than Jake. It has all the things that you associate with the Veneto: expensive ingredients even more expensively sold, treated with a tentative flamboyance, and more charm than love. There was a chic, make-your-own carbonara spaghetti. But it was a starter that rather epitomised the place (both the restaurant and Venice), a specially blown glass, which had four bowls of decreasing size, rather like a hubble-bubble that had swallowed a large bead necklace. Each contained a different ingredient: in the first was a tomato concassé; in the second, liquefied mozzarella; then fluid basil; and finally a spoonful of oil.

It was, the manager imparted, with a certain prestidigital smugness, the deconstruction of pizza. You chugged the lot like a yard of ale. Or, rather, 6in of Italian. And indeed, unsurprisingly, the cumulative effect is an arresting simulacrum of a pizza. It was remarkably and insistently like a foretelling of meals liquidised when you’re toothless, incontinent, ancient, in a hospice — which is clever, and admirable, but not altogether welcome at the start of dinner with friends.

The pizza glass was to Italian food what the balloon sculptor’s dog is to an alsatian.

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