I hadn’t had dinner with Jeremy Clarkson for ages. “Where are we eating?” he asked. Gilgamesh, I said. “What?” Gilgamesh. “What’s that?” Earliest recorded fiction. Written in cuneiform. Story of Babylonian deific king of Uruk and his wild and brutish friend Enkidu, who runs naked through the forest.

“I don’t like the sound of that.” It’s wonderful: a marvellously powerful poetic narrative that includes the original story of the flood. And you’re very like Enkidu. “No, I mean I don’t want to eat cuneiform.” Granted, it’s an odd name for a restaurant. “Where is it?” Okay, got a pen? The Stables Market. “That’s pretentious.” Chalk Farm Road. “Oh God, it’s north. The next thing you’re going to say is N something.” NW1. The ululating rant about north London’s inhabitants, their mothers, personal hygiene and habits that followed needn’t detain us.

I haven’t been to Camden Market since it was just three gently swaying hippies with a trestle table, a pile of mujaheddin hats that were like wearing an angry ants’ nest, a rack of Anatolian goatskin coats that were like wearing a butcher’s bin, 13 varieties of incense that all smelt of athlete’s-foot powder and four kilos of red Leb, which turned you into a ravenous slug. People often ask me if I think marijuana resin is addictive. The answer is absolutely yes: it makes you addicted to Curly Wurlys and prawn-flavoured crisps. And whatever happened to incense? It was the smell of my adolescence — along with cheesecloth and rejection. Everything was covered in little trails of ash, like a worm crematorium.

My, has Camden grown up. The market’s huge. And no more Mr Natural. Now you can be tattooed in 38 languages and pierced in 39 places. I doubt that one person in 10 was born in London. I walked behind a man speaking Haitian. There are a dozen varieties of hoodie, and representatives from every youth gang and Tintin book in the world. It’s like an alternative, post-modern boy-scout jamboree, or the inaugural meeting of the David Cameron Jugend.

Gilgamesh sits in the middle of this open-air, pan-national passeggiata, a huge, purpose-built restaurant. I found Jeremy at the bar, recommending getaway cars to a series of large men in dark glasses. “Have you seen this place?” he squeaked. “Have you actually looked at this place?”

It’s astonishing. You get in up an escalator. The main dining room is huge, and must seat up to 300 people. It has a retractable glass ceiling, three storeys high, and decoration that makes Cecil B DeMille look like St Francis of Assisi. The Babylonian theme has been extravagantly extemporised. Every surface is covered in bas-relief and woodcarvings taken from the great collection in the British Museum. These aren’t copies, they’re proper Bollywood pastiches, handmade in India.

Triumphal Babylonians peer down at you with a severe mien. Ancient Babylon didn’t have much of a sense of levity or tomfoolery. The cuneiform joke book was a very short tablet: “So, there was this Sumerian, this Assyrian and a Jew...” By way of light relief are the long pietra dura bar, made in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and some Chinese dragons nesting under the eves. To add to the theatrical effect, the lighting changes in a slow disco spectrum, bathing you in blue, green and red to match the music, which is part sword-and-sandals epic soundtrack and part sing-along pop classic.

The customers are a mixture of taxi drivers with their mistresses, Essex tanning-parlour magnates with both their mistresses, media workers with their boyfriends and a lot of girls who appear to be in search of a footballer. Some of the waiting staff wear curly radio earphones. Whether these are a simple style affectation or channel ancient voices, I don’t know. It doesn’t make them any more efficient.

The mise en scène is incongruously, but grandly, finished off with a coup de théâtre. The sports-dome ceiling opens onto the goods track to King’s Cross. Every five minutes, locos pulling containers of Korean gearboxes and German nail-polish remover emit ferrous screams 20ft from your table. The effect is stupefying.

This is a hysterical temple to grand kitsch. Real, unironic, poker-faced uberkitsch — which, you may have noticed, is taking over from twee functionalism as the decor du jour for London. And, like all really good bad taste, the question it screams at the viewer is: “Guess how much I cost? And who had the glass eye and incontinent wallet to pay for it?”

Then there’s the food. How could I forget? It’s a jabberwocky collection of Nobu Asian stuff: Japanese, Korean, Californian sushi; Chinese Singapore dumplings; Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese style. It’s overseen by Ian Pengelly, who worked at E&O, then the shortlived Pengelly’s. Despite the cacophony of the room, the number of covers and the distraction of so many Wag wannabes, the food is actually very good: well made, with clear flavours, imaginative combinations and attractive presentation. If you feel you’ve eaten a lot of it before, that’s because it is becoming London’s regional cuisine.

The service is charming, though the de rigueur description of every dish is an infuriating interruption. With the bill, I asked, as I always do, if the service charge went to the staff. The waiter said, yes, it did — to all the staff. So I punched in my Pin number and the amount turned out to be £20,000, and change. He’d left the option to add an extra tip, just for himself. This is greedy and crass. We have got to sort out the service-charge deal. Although each dish looks reasonably priced, the three of us managed to consume £200 worth of food without feeling stuffed.

So, to recap: there’s this Babylonian restaurant, decorated from India, serving Japanese-Chinese food, cooked by a Welshman, for Londoners from every corner of the world. It’s culturally incoherent. But before you sneer, it’s not socially so. This is what the melting pot looks like. And it’s certainly an improvement on three hippies.

Jeremy looked around and said: “You know, this could be the Grand Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, or Nineveh. I’m going to bring the kids.” He should hurry. I reckon any day now the Americans are going to invade and set up a green zone in the VIP Babylon bar.

GILGAMESH

Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1; 020 7482 5757.
Lunch, Fri-Sun, noon-3pm. Dinner, Mon-Sun, 6pm-midnight

5 stars Eton mesh
4 stars Officers' mesh
3 stars Gilgamesh
2 stars Pie and mesh
1 star Don't mesh with me

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