This is the month of guilt and regret: February Fill-dyke, as country root warriors used to call it — a drab, drear season of permadusk, drizzle, depression and diets. It’s the month where everyone gives up or is given up, 28 days of corporeal self-loathing and mortification, of stomach-pinching pulses, gruel and purées, of putting your hand over the glass and apologising. January is a time of optimistic resolution, but in February, the dysmorphia gets serious and the serious get dysmorphic.

This was a time of guilt long before the Christians got hold of the calendar. February, from the Latin Februum — purgation — is the month of purification. The Dutch call it Sprokkelmaand (vegetation month); the Anglo-Saxons called it Solmonad (mud month). The French revolutionaries renamed it Pluviôse (rain month). Nobody has anything good to say for feckin’ February.

It’s not a good month for restaurants. All the feasting of December and the leftovers of January have left kitchens exhausted. There’s nothing much to look forward to coming through the back door. Game is finished. Vegetables are goitred and woody, and taste thick-tongued and coarse. I saw an exotic fruit salad on a menu yesterday. “It’s not really going to be exotic, is it?” I said to the waiter. He gave me a look like a frostbitten cardoon.

“It’s got a bit of pineapple,” he offered. Funnily enough, pineapple is one of the few good things about February, but it’s not enough. Nobody’s ever going to call February exotic — or erotic, balmy, juicy, sensual or sophisticated.

Every other person I eat with is on some multi-denying diet. The absurd, gimlet-eyed flushers and evacuators, light-headed with righteousness, carry round specimen bottles of lemonade and chilli pepper (after a week, that’s got to sting like the Benghazi clap). Or they’ve got a glycaemic index or fatty footnotes, a porky preface or a flabby-arsed foreword.

Then there are the most miserable of all: those rupture-faced, vinous-veined, oenophilic trenchermen who give up alcohol for February. There’s a little coterie of them in London, all vaguely attached to the arts and broadcasting. Every February, with much eye-rolling and grim-jowelled determination, they put the bottle behind them — like those Russian men in their shivering Speedovitches who cut holes in the ice to go swimming, on the sound medical principle that anything this shatteringly ghastly must be doing you some good.

I should be sympathetic to the old chaps who sip ginger ale and near-beer to prove that they’ve still got willpower. But I can’t. Like a scarred veteran regarding paintball soldiers, I think they’re all a bit pathetic. It’s the desire to give up that’s the indication of the problem. Nobody stops eating lentils for February. Actually, I expect some poor terrified gastro-victim probably does.

The point is, February is a month where we should be stuffing and indulging, rubbing ourselves with duck fat, then rolling in peanuts and dancing in the garden for the benefit of the bluetits. We should be quaffing and burping to stave off the nasal drip and mawkish reverie. So, if you can wean yourself off mud month’s gastric flagellation and peptic evacuation, then you might like to step lively to Canteen, in Spitalfields, which has had some very, very good reviews and some even better word of mouth.

For me, though, it started badly. It began with a mission statement. Don’t you just love a mission statement? “Canteen is committed to providing honest food, nationally sourced, skilfully prepared and reasonably priced.” There’s nothing I like more than to start dinner with a banal generic truism, delivered with smug patronage. And I just knew there would be a concept; sure as delight follows decay, so conception follows mission. And sho’ nuff, the menu has been arranged in some new litany.

Before the sneer had dried on my face, however, I had to admit that, for once, this was not just a good menu, but actually an improvement on most other menus. This concept actually had a handle and did something. It was a boon to dining pleasure, comfort and safety.

It starts with all-day breakfast (toasted crumpets, bacon sandwiches, black pudding and bubble and squeak) and goes on to light dishes (soup, devilled kidneys, hot buttered arbroath smokies), then main courses (macaroni cheese, T-bone steak, gammon, fishcakes, pork belly with apples), then side orders (mushy peas, potatoes in duck fat). Then there’s an eminently sensible selection of fast food, plucked from the other categories. And finally, puddings — apple crumble, gingerbread and quince — and the PS of tea and biscuits. The most expensive dish on the menu costs £12; most of it is under a tenner.

Canteen is another step in the rehabilitation of English food, and it has been taken with a confident swagger. This isn’t nostalgic or light or twisted. It’s the best of caffs and steamy kitchens, and I was deeply impressed. The Blonde was overwhelmed, made foolish with happy gluttony. She ordered double dishes for every course. The waitress helpfully offered child’s portions for childish greed, which was more than reasonable considering the prices.

I began with a cheese and onion tart, then had a mutton pie. Pies are rather a feature. They change daily and come with greens, gravy and mash — like school, but without the lumps. The Blonde had potted duck with home-made piccalilli, and a piece of dayboat-caught cod, hacked from a huge fish, that was flakier than a Peter Mandelson promise. Jamie Rubin (who still has to be fed by hand) had the steak, and we all shared a macaroni cheese. The best pudding was the treacle tart with clotted cream — or what Jamie refers to as “that good white gunk”. All of it was as close to perfect as makes little difference. I was particularly impressed by the pastry — it was a masterclass in this most neglected and homespun discipline. Each was exactly right for the savoury and sweet tarts, and the pie.

Canteen is a plainly elegant room that harks back to collegiate catering and the caffs of youth. It stresses the natural goodness and strength of native food, the honesty, the understated but assured flavours, the fraternal harmonies. It’s dinner that doesn’t set out to flatter, flirt, astonish or show off, but rather to welcome, comfort and nourish.

At its best and most decent, English food isn’t a flashy date; it’s a best mate. And the stuff at Canteen is as true a plate of bright grub as you’ll find. The service was charming — and Australian.

In fact, Canteen is the first thing this year that has made me feel like a ray of bleedin’ sunshine.

Canteen

2 Crispin Place, Spitalfields, E1; 0845 686 1122

Mon-Fri, 11am-11pm; Sat-Sun, 9am–11pm Sundays

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