Eating a goat’s cheese salad piled with salty lardons and accompanied by super-crusty mountain bread in the French Alps recently, I had the desperately unoriginal thought that we still lag aeons behind the French when it comes to good food on a day-to-day basis. On the British index of plebeian gastronomy, mountain restaurants should be marginally worse than eating directly from a cow’s bottom, just like service stations, hospital and school canteens and greasy-spoon caffs. But the French feed their lorry drivers, their kids and their alpinists with the same inherent respect as their big-money restaurant-goers – no cheap, gooey bread, no cheddar fashioned from ear wax, no cardboard chips, no 99% bread, meat-flavoured “sausages”.

I laugh when people bang on about how London is the restaurant capital of the world. Yeah, right. As long as you have at least £50 a head to drop. When you can buy a decent crêpe on the street corner for a few quid, instead of the pigeon-excrement-smothered rubbish they sell from hot-dog carts, I might revise my opinion.

Having said that, a few days after the high-altitude salad, I visited a Tex-Mex restaurant in Chamonix called La Cantina. The diabolical food, even worse than the average British Tex-Mex experience, served to reassure me that the French lose it when they have to go off their comfortable culinary piste. They made a rack of ribs out of pork chops and served them up black as pitch. When they were sent back to the kitchen, the friendly manager said authoritatively that the dish was “caramelisé” – and at some point before the chop turned to porky-tasting charcoal bricks, maybe it was.

At L’Autre Pied, they do a nice line in caramelisé on, as the menu puts it, a “slow-cooked breast of veal, potato purée, caramelised sweetbread and hazelnut jus”. I never thought anything bovine had breasts you could eat (although I found a recipe for fried udder, translated from the original German, on the website of a Canadian househusband in Ontario). Veal breast is actually like infant brisket, and this baby had been confited, so its flavour was intense and its texture deliciously sticky, thanks to all that baby fat. The pairing of hazelnuts and creamy sweetbread was perfect, and the dish jumped from a menu that makes a feature of similarly tempting combinations. Phew: I had roped in a powder-hound buddy from the dodgy Chamonix Tex-Mex to dine with me. I owed him a decent feed and knew that, as the more accessible baby sister of Shane Osborn’s two-Michelin-starred Pied à Terre, L’Autre Pied would serve cuisine with haute ambitions.

The head chef, Marcus Eaves, did not disappoint. He has a charmed CV, which includes time at various Michelin-starred fine-dining rooms, a Gordon Ramsay scholarship in 2004 and a lot of time spent under the wing of Osborn, who must have great faith in his protégé, giving him, at 27, his own gaff to shine in.

A notable amount of thought has been put into the menu. For a start, there was an almost celebratory feel to the seasonality of the ingredients. The powder hound’s starter, button mushroom and smoked bacon duxelle, girolle velouté and trompette de la mort, was a velvety powerhouse of intense mushroom flavours fresh from the French forests. A salad of smoked eel came with lots of young springy herbs and veg, including some perfect little broad beans that tasted like the season’s green sunshine. A lot of critics – the killjoys – have slammed Eaves for performing too many fancy turns, but distilling the smoky essence of the eel into a panna cotta was inspired. At first, I thought I missed the oily, meaty texture of my most favourite smoked thing ever, but the creaminess of the panna cotta carried the flavour well, while strips of lardon provided a different type of fatty smokiness to chew on.

Eaves’s cheffy somersaults don’t always work, however. A rhubarb, pistachio and almond crumble did not benefit from elements of icy cold sorbet and a cardamom ice cream that chilled its traditionally cosy heart. I recently filmed a television show called Eating with the Enemy, in which keen home cooks present their dishes to a vile panel of critics, and this was exactly what most of the ambitious amateur cooks ended up doing with their crumbles: poshing them up, chilling them down and generally ripping the soul out of a much-loved dish.

But humbugging aside, back to the main course: I selflessly allowed the powder hound to order the veal, while I had a confit of salmon, which was meltingly sweet and soft, with a gentle horseradish velouté and cauliflower cream. Studding the delicate emulsion that covered everything in a pretty, light cappuccino were little pieces of razor clam that cut through the richness, salty and sharp.

Eaves’s cooking is baby’s first haute cuisine, informal entry-level fine dining at prices that aren’t much higher than a decent gastropub. This is lovely food without any ball-busting service or twiddly napery; if they can chill out the atmosphere a bit more, L’Autre Pied would service that need for relaxed restaurants where you can eat grown-up food.

I let the manager choose from a comprehensive list of wines by the glass for each course, and he chose well. I had sat waiting for the tardy powder hound with a vast gin and tonic and a dish of olives that I thought were petite Lucques, the most elegant and supermodelly of olives, but were actually Sicilian Nocellara. (I know this because I rang to check and was told that David Moore, Osborn’s partner in the two Pieds, thinks they’re “awesome”.) The wine list is mostly French and Italian, short but well chosen and well priced.

I like it here. If only it would relax a little more, I could imagine myself coming here often. Ambience is my shtick – when you find that rare place that manages to feel cool and laid-back while also serving fabulous food, you want to cling onto it.

The decor is not terribly exciting: gloomy, chinoiserie-inspired, back-lit panels inherited from the previous owners of the building. There’s a slight whiff of making the best of what we can get and of what we can afford. Eaves has also been criticised for his small portions, which strikes me as a load of rubbish in this age of obesity. The food is quite rich, and after three courses, I had had, as my dad always used to say was correct, an ample sufficiency. After several years reviewing gastropubs and local restaurants for the Evening Standard, I am desperate not to see any of the vast quantities of pointless slop I frequently had dumped under my nose ever again. Eaves is using great ingredients, cooking with great care and keeping his prices down. If we all ate delicious and small, we could get more people in lifts without alarms going off, and a sense of satisfaction from our food that derives not from a stomach-busting fullness but from sensory satiation.

The powder hound spotted the slight lack of chillaxed atmosphere, too. While I was twiddling with my coffee cup, he said: “Come on, let’s get out of here so the staff can turn the music on and have some fun.” Perhaps if they turned the music on a bit earlier, this place could function as a fine dining room for the fun-loving. I, for one, would go for that.

5-7 Blandford Street, W1; 020 7486 9696
Mon-Fri, lunch, noon-3pm, dinner, 6pm-10.45pm; Sat, lunch, noon-2.30pm, dinner, 6pm-10.45pm; Sun, lunch, 12noon-3.30pm, dinner, 6.30pm-9.45pm

5 stars: Brownie points; 4 stars: Charlie Brown; 3 stars: Foxy Brown; 2 stars: Brown Windsor soup; 1 star: Brown and out

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