This last restaurant review of the year is one in which the jaded critic traditionally looks backwards and reflects on the highs and lows of the gastronomic twelvemonth. Or, rather, looks back and block-copies text from previous reviews, pastes them into a new document, dashes off a weary intro and files the whole botched patchwork to his editor under the heading, “My Restaurants of the Year”.

It’s the sort of journalism that makes you want to kill yourself. Readers go to the quite unnecessary trouble and expense of purchasing a weekend paper during the Christmas break and then are expected to make do with a pompous rehashing of leftovers, whose only novelty is that it contains words for which the contributor has now been paid twice.

Still, here goes. Ha, ha. Not really. I am going to look back, because it is indeed a time for that, but I am going to look back a little further than the beginning of 2007 (a year which, for me, has been memorable almost exclusively for awful things) to the last days of 1851, and the publication of the first restaurant guide to London. It was called London at Table: or How, When and Where to Dine and Order a Dinner, and Where to Avoid Dining (I love that – you couldn’t publish a book in Victorian England and give it only one title, even a restaurant guide) and was published by Robert Hardwicke at 192 Piccadilly for an author who remains anonymous to this day (talk about conscientious).

I only came upon the book recently and was delighted not only by how much of it is as true today as it was 157 years ago, but also by how many of the author’s prejudices are ones I share myself. For if it is no longer the case that, “A plate of turtle and a grilled fowl done Indian fashion will repay a stranger for going the distance [to] The Ship and Turtle in Leadenhall Street,” you cannot argue with the warning that, “Leicester Square is the haunt of foreigners, and as they continue to frequent its restaurants, we must presume they are content with the fare provided for them.”

The book’s original intended audience was out-of-towners lost for a place to dine after a hard day’s trog round the Great Exhibition, but no modern critic could possibly argue with the advice to: “Avoid a house where ostentation is the ruling passion, where handsome plate prevails; where the host, as in the old story, boasts of his fine gildings, until some waggish guest exclaims, ‘Never mind your gilding, give us a taste of your carving.’”

Or with this: “It ought to be an invariable rule never to order any particular fish, but to name what is preferred, leaving it to the fishmonger to send the latest arrival from the sea-side.”

Or this: “In ordering a dinner at a country inn, the bill of fare is the most misleading guide in the world, it usually contains seven or eight soups, fish dressed in twenty ways, with every dish that the ingenuity of a man or woman can make out of beef, mutton, veal and lamb, and in twenty-nine cases out of thirty it happens that what you particularly fancy out of the list is not to be had.”

Or this: “[Avoid the restaurant] where the coffee is thick and cold as a November fog,” [and where everything is so grimy that you] “desire the waiter to serve the dinner on one plate, and the dirt on another”.

As he warms to his theme, our anonymous friend comes ever closer to my own personal preoccupations, begging us to eschew places “where the giver of the feast prides himself on things being out of season, and where nothing in season is worth touching,” until finally he warns us away from the restaurant where, “Your Amphytrion tells you long stories of his wonderful wines, and does not give you iced-water in July.”

A clean, unshowy room; simple, seasonal food; a jug of cold water. It’s all we have ever asked. And it’s exactly what you get at Le Café Anglais.

Part of a major redevelopment of the Whiteleys shopping centre in Bayswater (but with its own entrance), this is just the sort of high-ceilinged, big-windowed space you’d have been hoping for after a day goggling at the wonders of empire in Hyde Park. The vast exposed kitchen with its state-of-the-art machinery is a glowing tribute to technological advance, and the huge rotisserie where birds, lobsters and the legs of giant mammals rotate, hiss, giggle, drip and turn slowly gold, is a cast-iron megalith worthy of Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself.

This, as you have no doubt heard, is Rowley Leigh’s new place. A rare gentleman among chefs – one to whom our Victorian pal would have obsequiously doffed his hat – Rowley was one of the men who got this current restaurant scene of ours up and running back in 1987, at Kensington Place, and now he’s trying something else. I know him a bit, from eating out, but he’s not an actual mate. If this place was crap, and a big fuss about nothing, I’d say so.

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