I am aware that I will have to be careful with the Bull and Last, a pub 150 yards from my front door which has recently changed hands and is now serving some of the best pub food I’ve ever eaten, because I have been this way before.

On January 12, 2002, in only my second review in this slot, I raved about a new gastropub, constructed on the site of an old carpet warehouse, which had opened even closer to my house, a matter of some 50 or 60 yards away. I wrote that the cooking was terrific, the staff were gorgeous and the value was amazing. I read its arrival as a sign that Kentish Town had, finally, arrived. In my spectacular new local, I declared, “Nobody is showing off, nobody is trying too hard, and nobody, as far as I can tell, is looking to make a fast buck and sell up.”

On the back of that review the place was filled with Times readers for three months, encouraging the owners to open a second place, in Clerkenwell, and then a third, in Kensal Rise. And then, with the fast buck made, they sold up and buggered off. Oops.

The site became the second branch of a thoroughly depressing “wine restaurant” called Vinum. Tumbleweed blew through it for a while and then it closed. It lay empty for a while. Windows cracked, ceilings dripped, rats scuttled. And then it became a thing called Grand Union (or “GU”, as they bizarrely choose to call it), which, although advertised as a “cocktail and burger bar”, is really a place for local call-centre workers with varnished hair and elaborate facial stubble doodles to stand outside and smoke on Friday nights. And I can’t blame them; if you go inside some weary Slav tries to sell you a beef patty garnished with jam.

GU is part of a chain, I gather, so it may take a while to fail. But fail it surely will. A carpet warehouse thou wert, and to a carpet warehouse shalt thou return. Scant use to locals desperate for a drink and a decent pie, but a nice thing for Primrose Hillbillies to visit on Saturday afternoons, and pay through the nose for a giant kilim which will always look somehow wrong in the drawing room, until it is finally rolled up and hoicked into the attic to become food for moths.

The Bull and Last, which lies just opposite the Parliament Hill entrance to Hampstead Heath on the edge of what estate agents call Dartmouth Park (always be suspicious of an area named after a park that doesn’t exist), was an old-fashioned pub when I first knew it, in the early Nineties, mostly empty, burst banquettes round the walls, old ladies in pointed spectacles and green woollen coats, drinking port and lemon and pretending their tiny dogs didn’t smell of fox crap. At night a bit of darts, lager, the occasional fat traffic warden who turned out to be a strippergram. Great fun.

The inevitable gastrofication came in 1998, but was only half-hearted. They did OK “Mediterranean” cooking (seared bream with oven-roasted tomatoes, pan-fried ostrich steak, home-made gnocchi, that sort of caper) and it was a nice place for a quiet pint by the fire. But it faded, changed hands (nice people) and then fell silent.

Then, early this summer, I was passing by and saw chaps with posh voices standing outside discussing signs, putting up lanterns, carrying things about, organising workmen. I stopped to chat. These fellows had a pub in Putney that had done well, it turned out, and now they were trying this.

OK, it’s a second outlet, already part of a process that will end we-all-know-where. But this time I am forewarned, and can accept that just when I’ve come to depend on it, the place will be sold off and become a dog-fighting arena with incidental lager sales. So I will try not to get too attached.

But they do seem like nice boys, this lot, rather than the type who reckon they can give people a version of what they think they want, while cutting corners and hoicking the margins to pay for a bent Porsche and a crack at a posh bird. And if a place is good enough for Putney then, hell, it’s welcome round here.

Some people around think the place looks a bit funny: there are huge cows’ heads mounted above the bar, and a red wall covered in tankards. But it’s just a bar, a big wooden room with wooden tables, lots of sun in the afternoons, a nice fireplace and a small open kitchen. Not funny at all. I like it. And blackboards over the bar make modest but reassuring claims for the honesty of the ingredients (longhorn beef and Middle White pigs from Huntsham Farm, “a cow a month” from Rushbury House, Elwy Valley lamb, some veg from the sainted Secretts…).

When it finally opened, after a few weeks’ delay, I was more impressed with the knowledge and enthusiasm of the staff, and the variety and value of the wine list, and the style of the menu, than I was with the cooking itself. I ate a couple of times and thought, “OK, fine, but we’ve got a few of these round here as it is – reliable grub and nice people – I could have used something a bit special.”

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