A subterranean Orient Express

It sure is fun being single but it does make you awful chubby, and not in the pregnant way. After a stream of fine dining experiences with gentlemen, I'm rapidly gaining a lot to hold on to.

In the past 14 days alone I have been to Pied a Terre, Gordon Ramsay and, best of all, the Lecture Room at Sketch. It's hard to leave a bit on the plate for Johnny Manners and Jenny Bikini when the food you are eating is delicious and, in the case of Sketch in particular, the whole meal feels like an exciting adventure. (It's taken me 18 months to get up there and it was worth the weight.)

Much as I am happy not to be pining after some chap or other, I must admit the misery diet is the only one that works for me. No doubt some hapless bachelor will come and change all this soon, and portion control will be back in place.

I sympathise with those expense-accounting high-flyers who keep London's expensive restaurants in business at the cost of their waistlines. The dining room at Throgmortons will please the odd City belly. This vast old pub has four bars, a deli and an elegant, slim dining room deep in its subterranean bowels. This is a pub unlike any other I have been to.

Apart from the deli the entire place is underground. Some great original detailing remains from the Thirties, including a vast swathe of gold mosaic tiles. The dining room has huge chandeliers made from brown glass and shaped like giant bunches of grapes. It is extremely dark and narrow. To eat there is a bit like a ride on a wide Orient Express.

Prada Elaine and I took our private little Pullman seats and got stuck into an English wine called Curious Grape, made from a blend of grapes I have never heard of and as enjoyable as English wine has ever been.

They are only open for lunch at the moment. I suspect when they open in the evening the odd adventurous nocturnal creature will come here for fun, because Farika Skilton has some previous in this area. She was one of the early Nineties party cats, the Pussy Posse, who used to do proper decadent clubnights. After she hung up her cowboy hat she settled down to run a couple of pubs: The Duke in Roger Street and The Victoria on Mornington Crescent.

It's good to see a woman managing a boozer, and she must be the coolest landlady in town. She has an extraordinary address book of (now not so) Young British Artists, hardcore media types and the sort of Groucho-goers who gave the club such a good bad name.

They've got Charles Fontaine in the kitchen, a man with a bit of previous himself. He opened Le Caprice in the Eighties, and until last year he owned the Quality Chop House on Farringdon Road.

The menu is unashamedly British --skinny ladies will struggle to find a main course with the right lack of calories. Prada E and I went with the crab and sorrel tart to start. It was intensely crab packed, densely moist, great in every aspect apart from being a little too cool. I had some decent asparagus dressed in a smooth, garlicky vinaigrette. It came with some mature cheddar, which stopped it from being a lady-pleasing starter.