65 South Audley Street, W1; 0872 148 2277. Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-2.15pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30pm-10.45pm; Sun, 6.30pm-10.15pm

Five stars Hope springs eternal Four stars Hope and glory Three stars Cape of Good Hope Two stars Bob Hope One star Not a hope in hell

I had lunch last week with Camilla, who is my carer on this column, and Lucas Hollweg, who used to edit it and now writes the cookery pages, which are the best you’ll find in or on the English tongue. Trust me, I know. I used to write a recipe column. Tricky things.

Expert View

Pizzas are a difficult thing to review. They are essentially gay welsh rarebit, with variations on a toasty theme

AA Gill

• More

• Post a comment

Related Links

• AA Gill reviews Sushinho

So much of it is taken up with technical instructions and lists. I once expended 1,000 words on describing how to cut an onion. It takes 30 seconds to show you. Recipes are the least interesting things about food, and writing them is a bit like writing a beauty column — you wonder how many more times you’re going to have to tell some imagined, vacuous, pouty bint to stop when she gets to the edge of her lips, or what, exactly, “stiff peaks” are. There was a marvellously arch gay recipe writer who was asked by a very annoying reader how long and hard she should whisk egg whites to gain stiff peaks. The paper didn’t publish his reply.

We ate at St John, Fergus Henderson’s restaurant in Smithfield. It’s some time since I’d been, and I’d forgotten how good it is. Not so much forgotten as been swamped by the imitation and potted plagiarism. There are now so many dining rooms doing what Fergus started with his nose-to-tail eating that I’d misplaced the taste and texture of his kitchen, which leaves the polemics, the politics and the plated nationalism behind. It is just a wonderfully accomplished place. We ate snails bone marrow cured beef cuttlefish curds rabbits chitterlings pigeon old spot chop eccles cakes treacle tart ginger ice cream and madeleines for remembrance. The plates came, the forks hung over the table like metal herons in a linen pond, and we ate first for hunger, then for curiosity, and finally for just the marvellous joy, the deep, deep pleasure of eating. It is the first human rapture we ever experienced, the most ancient foundation of all culture and civilisation; our spirits are lifted, the table becomes the basket of a balloon that rises above the care and grind. You look down from lunch at the patchwork of your life stretched below. Nothing so elevates the mood and butters up the world like lunch.

Rather thoughtlessly, I accused Lucas of being pessimistic. He looked hurt, with the expression of a surprised scallop. “I didn’t wake up pessimistic,” he said. “I don’t think I’m pessimistic.” And he’s right. He’s just self-deprecating, which is not nearly the same thing. And I remembered a great truth I was once told by a cheesemaker: you can’t be an optimistic butcher, and you can’t be a pessimist and a good cook. That’s absolutely right. Cooks are optimists, or they’re not cooks. The act of cooking is hopeful; the ritual of creating life out of death, of making breath and brains out of muscles and roots. Food is the future concocted magically out of the past. Every time you beat the olive oil into the egg yolk, and it thickens and pales and glistens, you know that the egg will go on and on making mayonnaise longer than your arm can beat it. Nobody has ever got to the end of a yolk’s ability to make mayonnaise; it is infinite, a kitchen spell of infinite hope, the promise of endless potato salad, poached salmon, dipped crabs’ claws, gulls’ eggs, ham sandwiches, chips, and chips.

Continuing my quest to eat out as far away from London as possible, the Blonde and I travelled to a distant cafe for your gustatory pleasure, by way of South Audley Street, which is where Kai discreetly sits. It’s a discreet street that lies in the shade, hoping not to be noticed in Mayfair. There used to be a spy shop here, but it must have defected. Or perhaps it’s still here, in deep cover, pretending to be another sort of shop. I don’t know anyone who’s ever eaten at Kai; nobody has recommended it; I haven’t read anything about it; I don’t think the chef takes part in televised gameshows with retired soap stars; yet it has a Michelin star, and I thought I’d eaten in all the restaurants in the city with stars in their pies. Certainly all the Chinese ones. London’s Cantonese and Peking restaurants are on the endangered list, threatened by the fashion for Thai and the understandable preference of the smart Hong Kong immigrants to do more with their lives than slop chow mein and lemon chicken in front of slurred visiting football fans.

The first thing you notice about Kai is that on a balmy summer night, it is the temperature of a Macau madam’s smile. The air conditioning is set to cryo-genocide Americans. The room is greige, with occasional indications that there may be some passing oriental flavour, but it’s mostly international unthreatening. The menu is laid out for round eyes; there aren’t 1,000 numbered dishes and it’s difficult to know whether you’re supposed to eat three or 23.

As ever, the Blonde and I erred on greed over caution. We started with soup, which came in huge plates. My eight treasures had the jellified consistency of bird’s nest or shark fin and was exceptionally delicate, complex, although I could only count seven treasures. The Blonde’s hot and sour was more polite than I like, but perfectly constructed.

I asked the waiter if the Chilean sea bass was from a sustainable source. “We are searching for a supplier,” he smiled apologetically. I liked the oriental implication that the really rare, precious and endangered thing was an ethical fishmonger, rather than the fish. I mean, there’s plenty of fish in the sea. Chilean sea bass is a restaurant name awarded by American maître d’s to something that in real life is called a Patagonian toothfish, a habitué of a very cold South Atlantic, one of the most utterly delicious of all fish, and this one, cooked with those small mushrooms you find grown in the corners of damp bedrooms, was delicious. The Patagonian toothfish, incidentally, is the only known predator of the right whale dolphin, a small and little-known dolphin without an agent, which doesn’t have a dorsal fin. Not a lot of people know that.

The home-made tofu also had no dorsal fin, and was a role model for all tofus, which are usually indistinguishable from window putty. The most remarkable and distinguished thing, though, was pudding, a Peranakan mango cake. Peranakans are bereft of dorsal fins as well, being the fascinating Chinese community of Malaya. They make very good black pudding. So this is all fine and dandy. The service is speedy and informed. The food has earned its star, and as I looked around, I would bet that every other table here had been furnished by the concierge of a four-star hotel. It made the atmosphere rather lost, like the first-class lounge of Cathay Pacific.

I would recommend Kai, I would come back myself, except for one thing: the bill. For the two of us, with one glass of wine, it was £216.56, service included.

Times Recommends

• Thomasina Miers’s cabbage and bitter leaves on garlic toast
• Food that's good for body and soul
• Carrot, date and goat's cheese salad