50 Marylebone High Street, W1 (020-7258 8599).
Breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.

I am a vegetarian. I imagine this comes as a bit of a shock to you. What with me always writing things like: "the carpaccio of slowly beaten weasel cubs was both lively and well-garnished" and "I was particularly taken with the red pepper and songbird ragout that accompanied my fricassee’d orphan."

But it is true. After years of laughing at the rabbit-food that goes into vegetarians and the terrible wind that comes out of them, I finally joined their number in the autumn of 1999 because it is right and proper and decent, and because it is both environmentally and morally sustainable.

Most farming of animals is cruel to the animal, harmful to the environment, wasteful of resources and scandalously neglectful of the common gustatory decencies in the product it puts on your plate. Personally, I was always prepared to source properly farmed meat for my own table but eating away from home became embarrassing. I just wouldn’t touch the dead things that friends and restaurants served up. So I did the politest thing, and turned veggie.

I love being part of the vegetarian community. We wink at each other in the vegetable aisle of organic supermarkets, have sexy fumbles under the bushes at pick-your-own plantations, and stick close to each other at dinner parties like Jews at a Chelsea match. We are close relatives of both the cycling and the dope-smoking communities - our sense of social responsibility has driven us paradoxically into the counter-culture, we cleave to ancient values while espousing futuristic ideals, we smell a bit funny and we’re always knackered.

Though a committed vegetarian, I do lapse occasionally, like any abstemer. I eat meat maybe four times a week. Obviously it’s a bit more often than that in winter because of the weather. Say, six times. That’s red meat, of course. A couple of times a week I also have a bit of chicken, as long as it’s supplied by my organic butcher in Kentish Town, which I think of not as a butcher but as a health-food store that is temporarily out of nuts.

That doesn’t make me a carnivore, though. Any more than smoking the odd fag makes one a smoker. Personally, I don’t smoke. Although I confess I’ll snarf down maybe seven or eight of somebody else’s fags when I’m pissed. Which is rare, as I’m teetotal.

Thereafter, I’m 100 per cent meat-free. Unless you count bacon. And you can’t. All veggies eat a bit of bacon. And, of course, fish. Otherwise it’s tofu schnitzel and beancurd wieners all the way. And also "Beanie Burger Insiders" with this great yicky fake cheese stuff inside, and all those fake sausages you find in Waitrose called "Lincolnshire" and "Cumberland", presumably in homage to the great beansprout breeds of the ancient North, such as the belted Hereford bean, and the fearsome longhorn sprout.

So imagine my delight, fellow Earth gods and goddesses, when I heard that a new vegetarian restaurant was to open on Marylebone High Street. And then imagine my dismay when I heard that it was to be called Eat and Two Veg. At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to go. My oncologist says I must stay off punning shop titles altogether if I want to see my fortieth birthday (it’s why I have to have my hair cut at home). A name like "Eat and Two Veg" is so cheesy that vegans will have to stay away.

And that would be a shame, because Eat and Two Veg is one of the most original restaurants I have been to in years - a mainstream venue for mainstream food for mainstream people, that doesn’t use any meat at all. As opposed to a bamboo shack in Primrose Hill that does goat’s cheese and filo pastry 12 different ways for pierce-nosed graphic designers with vegetable-dyed hair.

E&2V is on the sight of the old Bentley Garage next door to the Conran Shop, but serves a lot less beef. It is modelled on the traditional American diner, and achieves that eat-first-talk-later feel without descending into Ed’s Diner-style pastiche. The starters were a bit plain but then satay with peanut sauce is always plain, whether it’s skewers of chicken, beef or tofu. And the bruschettas, one of tomato, one of broad beans and peas, were nice and fresh but under-seasoned and barely garlicked. No complaints about the steamed and fried Chinese dumplings or the Thai spring rolls - all perfectly correct, if bland.

And then an excellent shepherd’s pie. The Quorn-style meat-substitute provided everything that lamb could have done apart from the faint tang of wickedness. And it had the great advantage of containing no gnarly shards of toenail and scrotum. If I had children and I thought they were out of my sight eating a shepherd’s pie whose CV I had not perused, I would want it to be this one.

Times Recommends

• Britain's Top 20 seaside fish and chip shops
• Ice cream makers: the scoop of the century
• British berries make super sorbets