Gosh, it’s a long time since I reviewed a restaurant like this. It must be getting on for a decade since I last headed down to Clerkenwell to a big, glistening space with exposed painted brickwork, where the open kitchen shimmers with brushed steel, the place is smoothly staffed by good-looking girls and tall, gay skinheads, and the menu is a typed A4 sheet of fusion cooking’s greatest hits (“chorizo, date and feta fritters, tamarind yoghurt”; “chermoula baked line-caught sea bass, quinoa, tomatillo and preserved-lemon salad, spiced toasted seeds”…). It just felt so… I dunno, so 1999.

But in a good way. A great way. A wonderful way. I didn’t know until halfway through my dinner at the Modern Pantry how bored I was with New Old Skool British Plush – you know, all that oysters, kedgeree, Barnsley chop, plum duff malarkey, served on big plates in oat-coloured rooms with dark wood and interesting artwork. I clamoured for it when I couldn’t get it, and now I’m bored with it.

And now, just in time, “fusion” – the dirty word of early 21st century restauranting – makes a comeback. And it could come back in no more fitting or confident hands than Anna Hansen, Peter Gordon’s buddy from the Sugar Club and Providores.

And it’s in Clerkenwell, of all places. Do you remember Clerkenwell? Towards the end of the last century, for just a couple of months, after Greek Street and before Shoreditch, it was positively the place to open a restaurant. St John and Moro went on to lasting greatness, Stephen Bull imploded, the famous gastropubs got rather overtaken by events, the Zetter flickered enticingly for a while. And then the world moved on.

I hardly even remembered where Clerkenwell was. Driving south from Islington (ah, Islington, where the tumbleweed rolls and nobody has opened a restaurant with knives and forks since 1996), I blinked twice and was on Gray’s Inn Road. So I U-turned, and eventually found the Modern Pantry skulking rather magnificently in an office-colonised Georgian square behind Farringdon Road.

The feel of the place is mock New York (at the point where Meatpacking-lite meets ersatz Flatiron), but where once the clientele would have been young and bendy with gelled fins in their hair, this lot were older, softer, balder. They had come for nostalgia. For a blast from the Fountain of Youth. For comfort food.

Yes, indeed. In a world where Lancashire hotpot and pease pudding occupy the cutting edge, such dishes as “truffled artichoke, tarragon and parmesan crostini”, “krupuk quail eggs, lime and chilli dipping sauce”, and “confit duck leg, roast sweet potato, beetroot, black bean, liquorice and ginger salsa” must be treated as old favourites. And they were good. They were fine. The chorizo fritters mentioned at the top of this piece looked a bit like massive chocolate truffles and a bit like onion bhajis, and tasted of something in-between. The quail eggs were a little overpowered, being delicate things. And a plate of slow-cooked octopus had rather gone the way of all mush. But my girlfriend loved her bass and quinoa. She’s a bit younger than me, so she was still at university the first time quinoa came round and – ha ha, you’re going to love this, this is gonna crack you up – she pronounced it “kwin-o-ah”. I know, I know. I’ve told her it’s “keen-wa” and she’s promised to try to remember.

She also wanted to know what was so good about the bass being line-caught, and I had to say, if you’re the bass in question, not much. It’s just like being run over as opposed to dying in a plane crash. A bit less horrific, but still bloody bad luck.

I had a vast miso-marinated onglet which, though I asked for it medium-rare, came as blue as the day it was ripped untimely from its mortal coil. But, to be fair, that only showed off all the better the effect of the marinade. The flesh was rich and wet and dark and venal and… Is “venal” right? Sort of. Not quite, but one runs out of words. Unless one is writing for the food pages of The Guardian, where “toothsome” will always do.

At any rate, it was set off perfectly by a heap of cassava chips that were just astounding. Cassava is the übercarb, lighter and more powdery than potato and almost entirely without nutritional value, which is why GM scientists have tried to work dietary supplements such as vitamin B12 into its DNA to benefit the famine-struck sub-Saharan Africans who eat little else for most of the year. On the plus side, it makes the most magnificent chips. All the cold blood and death of the super-rare steak was absorbed and warmed and jollified by the rasp of hot, naked starch. It’ll remind you of when you were little and the steak on holiday was too rare, but your dad said if you didn’t eat it you’d be taking it home in a bag and having it for breakfast, so you crammed small bits into your mouth with loads of chips until it tasted almost like hamburger. (What? Your dad never said that? Well, and look how you turned out…)

For pudding there was a mango meringue which, according to my girlfriend, was a bit too big and a bit too sweet. Qualities she knows I do not appreciate. And also the meringue was apparently a bit too dusty. But dustiness is why I don’t eat meringues in the first place, so I’m not going to tear them apart for that.

For the record, my doris also liked the low-wattage bulbs and the copper lampshades. The tables, she thought, were too “slippery” but the walls were pretty – if you are a sucker for eau de nil. Which she apparently is. Who knew?

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