Two excellent Italian restaurants opened in London towards the end of last year. That is obviously good news. Not as good as if two excellent Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, Spanish, Hungarian, or British restaurants had opened, but, still, good.

No disrespect to Italy. Italian food is fine in its way, but I’ve always got the impression that other people like it more than I do. So while I accept that it is a beautiful thing and will discuss it when I have to, I generally leave the enjoyment of it to others. As with modern dance, handmade shoes, fly-fishing and gay sex.

I suppose the "purer" of the two restaurants, given the rather puritanical requirements of London’s Italophilic mwah-mwah set ("Meat is served alone on the plate, darling"; "One never has parmesan on a seafood pasta dish, darling") would be Theo Randall at the Intercontinental.

After an impressively executed meal of bagna cauda (I’d explain what it is, but everyone who’s anyone will know), various pastas served virgin-white and quite poetically plain (sauces are sooooo un-Italian), a bright but patchy burrida di pesce (Italians invented the bourride, darling, not the French), and a veal chop (giant, alone, beans and spinach sheepishly watching from the sidelines), I was all ready with the following advice for Mr Randall: "Throw off the creaking shackles of this glowering Park Lane hotel, Theo," I drew breath to say. "What you need is a sleeker, breezier spot. Maybe on a river. Somewhere with a younger, hipper clientele. Hammersmith, say. It will much better reflect the spirit of your cooking. You’ll be massive. I tell you, you could define a decade."

Except that he’s done 15 years at the River Café already. Oh yes. Head chef he was. The unsung hero. Rose and Ruthie got all the credit. Theo got the second degree burns, RSI and rickets. Now, poor lad, he’s got his own place.

There’s nothing wrong with the dining room: it’s dimly lit, brown, quiet, and rather brutally divided with the walls and columns that support the many floors of a big urban hotel. It’s got a bar. It’s got waiters. It’s got giant tables that make enthusiastic food-sharing next to impossible. But it doesn’t have much to do with the Tuscan dreams of a certain sort of rosy-cheeked English middle-class lady, and it doesn’t really fit the grub. It cries out for cod mornay and crêpes suzettes, not smoked eel with pickled vegetables, salad of radicchio, dandelion, rocket, trevisse, mache and aged balsamic, pan-fried squid with borlotti beans…

The pasta was too authentic for me, I’m afraid. Ravioli and the like were cooked perfectly al dente (there are Ladbroke Grove bachelors who will speak for 45 minutes without interruption — even when you are beating them with a stick to make them shut up — about the firmness of proper Italian pasta) but so restrained as to be somewhat joyless in the eating. When I called her a minute ago my girlfriend genuinely couldn’t remember whether she had had the agnolotti stuffed with veal, partridge, pancetta and parmesan or the ravioli of mixed winter greens with chard, rocket, cima di rape, sheep’s ricotta, butter and sage, both of which were ordered by the table.

"It was the little white pillows that didn’t taste of much," she said, not narrowing it down at all, for both were that way. "You said it could do with a splash of Dolmio."

"Shhhhh…" I said. "If you say it that loud the readers will hear and think I’m a common brute who knows nothing of fine Italian dining."

We also shared a plate of tagliolini with white truffle. Again, bland or just posh? I’m not quite sure. Interestingly, the menu informed us that 5g of truffle would be used in the £21 dish. Normally this would not give me pause. Except that my mother bought me a white truffle for Christmas and when I went to my River Café Cook Book Two to see how far it ought to stretch, I found that Rose and Ruth (poor Theo is merely acknowledged en passant) recommend 30g per person.

Quite a difference, especially when you consider that my mum will not have got the deal on her truffle that Theo does on his. So, Theo, Ruth, Rosie, how the hell much truffle do you need on a dish of pasta? 5g or 30g?

I guess it depends on whether you are two lovely Chelsea ladies for whom money is no object, writing for lots of other Chelsea ladies for whom money is no object, or a chef struggling to tally the books in his own gaff after years of servitude.

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