First, I introduced the meat/fish score to my restaurant rating system to encourage the industry to adopt a more sustainable approach to the sourcing of its ingredients, since when organic or free-range or locally reared, or at least vaguely respectable meat and fish has begun to feature more often than not on the menus of decent restaurants.

Then I went after water, scoring restaurants ten out of ten for the exclusive provision of tap water or sustainably-minded bottled versions such as Belu. That’s moving along nicely now, with the makers of Evian, Perrier and San Pellegrino on their financial knees, screaming for mercy, and the world water ecology beginning to turn back from the brink of apocalypse.

And so now, because there’s no campaign like a new campaign, I’m turning my mind to hand-driers.

Hand-driers are bad. You can tell just to look at them. Great big metal things that get all hot and make a terrible noise. They are the motorbikes of the washroom. The coal-fired power stations of the post-piddle clean-up. You simply can’t justify that much energy, that much heat and sound, that much waste, just to get your hands a little less wet.

It’s not as if they actually work. They take far too long. By the time I’m halfway through a slash, I’ve usually got three hilarious things I’ve thought of that I want to rush back and tell my dining companions. By the time you’ve finished peeing and washing your hands, the last thing you want to see, as you worry that the conversation will have moved on and your top quip may die alone and forgotten in the windblown attic of your mind, is some rusty old box on the wall that will wheeze feebly over your frantically rubbing hands like the last, cold breath of an expiring soldier.

That’s when you have to grab bog roll from one of the cubicles to dry your hands, and then they’re still not quite dry, so you wipe your hands in your hair to finish off and get little pills of rolled grey paper all over your head so that everyone stares at you when you get back to the table, and you look in the mirror and shriek, and the things you were so looking forward to saying get forgotten altogether.

You can tell the really bad driers because they’re so small, and thus doubly powerless and slow. Men will often clock these on their way into the bathroom and make a decision not to wash their hands at all. And I hate to eat in a roomful of people with pee on their hands (you see them rummaging in the bread basket just before it comes to you: “Shall I have this one or this one? Ooh, this one feels nice, too, or maybe this one…”), which is why I always hit the loo as soon as I arrive in a restaurant and, if the drier is small, leave immediately and eat somewhere else.

My least favourite drier is probably the one at Frascati in Hampstead, which is bracketed to the wall six feet off the ground, so that when you raise your hands to receive its weedy electric fart, water runs down your sleeves into your armpits.

And if there are some that do a reasonable job of drying your hands, blasting them dry with a torrent of screeching hot air only five times more slowly than you could have done it with a towel, then these are the ones whose ecological horrors are most obvious. That they are usually labelled “World Dryer Corporation” only underlines the damage they are doing to the planet from which they have taken their name.

So from now on, I’m going to start marking restaurants out of ten for how they dry your hands. And the only way to score ten will be to install a Dyson Airblade, which uses jet-engine technology to pump out room-temperature air at 400mph through a 0.3 millimetre slot, creating a constant sheet of air that acts like a windscreen wiper, drying both hands in 10 seconds and using 83 per cent less energy than conventional dryers – you just dip your hands in, remove them, do it again and off you go.

Launched at the end of last year, the Airblade has now made its first appearance in a British restaurant at Canteen in the Festival Hall, newly opened second outlet of the award-winning all-day modern British joint in Spitalfields, which thus becomes the first restaurant to score 10/10 for its drier.

As it also scores 10/10 for its sustainable approach to meat and fish, 10/10 for prioritising tap water but also serving Belu, and 10/10 for serving by far and away the best food in the redeveloped complex (discussed a few weeks back in my review of Skylon), it is in danger of getting a quite frankly monstrous score. Except that it is not going to get a score, because I am not reviewing it this week.

And the reason I am not reviewing it is that it will be no help at all in my quest – described over the past few weeks – to find somewhere that deserves a really, really terrible review, which I can tuck into with that scatological gusto you so enjoy, and of which you have been deprived for so long, what with me turning up gem after gem.

Geale’s, on the other hand, the old fish and chip shop in Notting Hill recently re-opened under celebrity owners, is just what I’ve been looking for. I went the other week and it was a thramping cruppet of droik from beginning to end. (Apologies if that didn’t mean anything, I haven’t done a negative review for so long I’ve rather lost my handle on the lexicon.)

Geale’s has been repainted since I last went and looks reasonably presentable from the outside, but then so does Robert Mugabe. We were shown to our table by a waiter of Bond-villain stature and mien, who looked like the last time he smiled was when he threw the family cat off the roof to see if it landed on its feet and accidentally impaled it on a railing.

To start, we ordered prawn cocktail, half a cold lobster and the dressed crab. They came, but that was all. No toast appeared. And yet it is widely known that the idea of dressing crab and cocktailing prawns came about as a direct result of a chap inventing hot brown toast and wondering what would be the best thing to put on it.

My friend Max asked if toast was coming. Jaws said not. “Is there any chance you could bring us some toast?” asked Max. “Or if you can’t manage that, then maybe some bread?” “I’ll see,” said Jaws.

Some time later he returned with a bowl of cold bread: £34 worth of cold shellfish starters and they can’t give you toast. Even Robert Mugabe would have given us toast.

The prawn cocktail (served in a giant sample bottle, slightly chipped) was made without ketchup. Max was baffled: “Sauce Marie Rose was the only good thing to come out of the Seventies, apart from massive redistributive taxation, of course. How can you serve prawn cocktail without it?”

We asked for a bottle of ketchup and stirred it in. So, £34 for do-it-yourself cold shellfish and no toast. Oh, and the lobster was underdone, transparent and squelchy. And the battered sole was wet and grey like frozen fish sometimes gets. And none of the waiters had any idea where the fish came from or how it got here.

And the chips were awful. Although they were glorious by comparison with the onion rings, which were quite the most terrible thing I have ever seen, their hard, gritty flavourlessness indicating that very old vegetable slices had been rolled in Hoover bag fluff and fried in WD-40.

As for the hand-driers, I didn’t notice, as I’d never bother to wash the widdle off my hands in a place this grim. To be honest, they can count themselves lucky I took the trouble to aim at the bowl.

Geale’s

2 Farmer Street, London W8
(020-7727 7528)

Meat/fish: 3
Cooking: 3
Service: 1
Water: 10 (Belu)
Hand-drier: Oh come on, you didn’t really think I was going to start scoring hand-driers?
Score: 4.25
Price: That terrible meal for two was £80 for two courses before booze.

Canteen
Royal Festival Hall
Belvedere Road, London SE1
(0845 6861122)

Ten out of ten all round (as above), and they happen to do very good fish and chips as well. And they’ve got a cute manageress. And toast.

E-mail feedme2@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere that does toast, and maybe we’ll go there together

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