I don’t know where the hell they get off, calling a swanky St James hotel restaurant Andaman. Have you been to the Andamans? I have. They are a collection of picturesque, slightly brutal islands in the Indian Ocean, and I do not recall finding swanky hotel restaurants. Indeed, I do not recall finding restaurants at all. Or many hotels. There’s basically nothing there at all, beyond fishermen, palm trees, coconuts and the odd hippy with a hammock and a pan.

If you want to eat on most of the Andaman Islands, you have to buy rice and soak it in your pan until all the weevils bob to the top. Then you must sit in your hammock for three days until a man comes past who will sell you a fish. Thereafter, you should burn your fish, eat your fish while fighting off the hordes of escalatingly unusual insects who want to eat your fish too, turn your dirty pan upside down, hang your trash from a tree, and settle back to wait for the diarrhoea to start. If you don’t turn your pan upside down, an army of grimly determined hermit crabs will rise up from the sea in the night, climb up the side of it, fall in, get stuck and keep you awake until dawn with the sound of valiant clanging. If you don’t hang your trash from a tree, those same hermit crabs will chop it up into little squares and take it away.

This is helpful in a sense, but also sort of depressing, particularly when it is tinfoil. All in all, my point being, it’s not really a St James sort of vibe.

St James? St Jameses? St Jamesesees? I never know how to say it. Thoroughly un-Andaman a place, anyway. Although it turns out that there is a reason for the Andaman name, and that reason is humour. And not just any old sort of humour, but the best and cleverest and funniest humour of all, which is German humour. You see, the restaurant, in the newly refurbished St James’s Hotel and Club, is the first London venture of Dieter Müller, the German chef of whom you will certainly have heard, if you are German or just particularly into chefs. Marco Polo visited the Andamans en route to China, and it was this visit that inspired the restaurant. Hence the lacquer and wicker, and other vaguely Asian-feeling decor choices. They even offer a Marco Polo Afternoon Tea. But what does Polo actually say about the Andaman Islands? Why, almost nothing, except for a gross libel that the islands are infested with grotesque, dog-headed cannibals.

Do you get it? It sounds like a nice name, but it is actually a nasty name. Do you see? I do hope one needn’t have a half-German wife or something to be prepared to admit just how exceedingly funny this is.

Go on. Treat yourself. Put the paper down and cry, “Ha!” while heartily slapping a thigh. Oh yes. This joke is quite the hoot.

“It might not even be a joke at all,” said the wife, quite viciously. “Maybe he just didn’t read it properly.”

“Please,” I said. “We must end this conversation. For I am laughing so much I fear my head may fall off.”

So if it had just been the two of us, I may have grown a little sneery. No, really, this can happen. Plus, we’d have spent the whole night having that “Should we have tried to eat the hermit crabs?” debate, and it never ends well. So I also dragged along our friends Hannah and Jeremy, who work in telly and are fun and loud and could be relied upon to say humorous things throughout the meal which I could scribble down, and steal, and pretend were jokes of my own. “Clarified duck essence?” roared Jeremy, doing his bit from the word go.

“But what is the essence of a duck? Please, can you clarify it for me?” Then they brought us some sort of cheesy amuse-bouche, which Hannah sent away because of her allergies, and my wife sent away because she is pregnant. They may have hated us in there.

The service was intermittently excellent and nowhere. Our initial waiter reminded me of the possessed artist from Ghostbusters II who is played by the guy who played the little weird lawyer called Biscuit in Ally McBeal. You know who I mean? No, probably not. Indefinably Slavic. Fixed, slightly toothy smile. Talked a bit like he was falling. Go on, check on IMDb. If he was the same guy who turns into that giant, man-eating dog in the original, that would be rather neat, but I think that’s somebody else.

They have two menus for dinner, one of which is à la carte, and one of which is a tasting menu. The tasting menu comes with either four courses or five courses or six courses, and you each get to pick what you want for each. Three of us wanted to do that. Hannah, who has the sort of allergies that make her unable to tolerate earth, wind, fire, etc, wanted a couple of modified things off the à la carte.

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