In the week that she opened Murano, her first new restaurant since the closure of her dining room at the Connaught last year, Angela Hartnett accepted a commission (no doubt wangled by the blue-chip PR company that handles all Gordon Ramsay Holdings restaurants) to write the “Diary” column on the comment pages of The Observer.

She described the pressure and drama of the run-up to opening, discussed the role played (or not played) by Gordon himself, which will have been insisted upon by the commissioning editor, and then went on to describe the succession of “soft” evenings she had held for friends and colleagues prior to the opening proper, explaining that, “What you want is feedback.”

I love chefs. And I love Angela Hartnett most of all. “What you want is feedback,” my arse. What you want is admiration, praise, love. Same as Gordon, same as Marco, same as any really top, top performer. Same as Cristiano Ronaldo, Freddie Flintoff and Madonna. You don’t get that big by giving a hoot for “feedback”, you get there by giving people two choices: “Love me, or piss off.”

Right after declaring that what she wants is feedback, Angela writes, “People told me they thought the portions were small, which surprised me.” “Surprised” her. Yes, like Churchill was “surprised” when the French generals told him that if Britain fought on alone she would have her neck wrung like a chicken. Note that Angela does not say that she changed her portion sizes in response to this feedback. Or give any indication that she even considered doing so.

And she goes on, “A couple of people criticised the spinach tortelli… but to be brutally honest they didn’t understand the dish.” Ah yes, there’s a girl who can take criticism. Positively thrives on feedback. I know the feeling, I love feedback too. Oh yes, I assiduously read all the online comments at the bottom of my articles, and all the e-mails I get from readers, many of them several times, especially the negative ones, and then I carefully adjust my style to accommodate the needs and opinions of each and every one of you. Just like Angela.

And so I know that she will not be “surprised” at all by my opinion of Murano, which is that the cooking here, right from the start, has been as good as anything you can get in London just now. Sure, there are things you might not “understand”, but you are small and meek and have piddling powers of comprehension. Like the French girl I took the first time I went, who absolutely insisted that she must have grilled foie gras to start, despite the fact that it featured on the seven-course tasting menu but not on the à la carte, from which we were ordering (I do love French girls – they never, ever want exactly what is on the menu), and was then horrified still more to learn that it was served with “sweet and sour tomatoes”.

“Ah don’t onderstand zees!” she squealed. “What ees zees sheet weez tomatoes? You can’t ave aceedic sings weez foie gras. Make zem change eet!” But I didn’t, and the dish was stunning. Even stunned the French bird. The toms had been marinated in honey, or steeped, or whatever, and were utterly transformed, wondrously sweet, offering grapey fruit scents and rich vanilla which were perfect with the awesome liver, so assiduously deveined and perfectly cooked I might almost have overturned years of ethical objection and ordered it myself.

But I’m sure you will understand the sizzling little “arancini” balls of truffled rice that come with your first drink, and the sweet, shaved ham that flops so nicely on a smashed fragment of crispy pane carasau (or “carta di musica”), with a drizzle of gorgeous peppery olive oil. And you’ll understand the immaculate standard of cooking from there on, even if the elegant extenuation of traditional Italian cooking to a point where it almost shades into the stateless pomp of the Ramsay tradition is not absolutely to your taste.

The vitello tonnato, for example, was beautiful, wafer-thin, rare roasted veal with only weeny spits of tuna sauce (and cunning little crunches of crisped anchovy) which you might perhaps think a little ungenerous, even a little bit repressed (and they’ll give you a jug of the stuff to slosh on if you ask nicely), but I rather concur with what I assume is Angela’s feeling: that an excess of tuna mayo can turn this miraculous dish into something too much like a petrol station sarnie.

All the fish dishes I tried were awesome. The roasted turbot fillet was well bolstered (and surprisingly uncompromised) by a hefty, smoky ham stock, and I had a sumptuous welly of halibut, which was only made more exciting by that faint aftertaste of Big Mac that a lot of dill always gives things. They were very generous with the red mullet, too, which was in peak condition and very late-summery with its muscular little fillets glimmering on a heap of crushed peas, green as emeralds.

As a total experience, that supper was not as good as a wonderful lunch I had there a few days later (that first evening the wheels rather came off in the kitchen, and while standards never dropped below the thoroughly awesome, service slowed to a treacly pace and we ended up skipping pud).

The room, which is a bit Ramsay Eurobland (if I’d only had the foresight a few years back to invest heavily in beige), comes alive on a sunny lunchtime, and the staff lighten up a bit. Things moved a lot faster and for only £25 one hardly deserved a three-course meal of the quality that was served. The ravioli of king prawn (as the ravioli of crab had been a few nights before) was a single, vast dumpling of perfect pasta and bouncing, yabbering young shellfish whose only failing (if you can call it that) was to be faintly reminiscent of those whopping tortellini that Gordon made famous at Royal Hospital Road so many years ago (although I don’t know if they still do them there, I’ve not been in years).

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