A toast to the roast

To master the craft of roasting a large joint of meat - whether it be beef, lamb, pork or perhaps the very finest of all, a loin of veal - is one of the many joys of good cookery.

All at once, it sorts out the men from the boys. Although there is nothing wrong with a best-end of lamb as a roast for just two people, it is almost a mimsy thing compared with the magisterial, dripping joint.

Artistically speaking, the former is akin to painting by numbers, whereas the latter will always be more the result of a successful morning's work in a life class.

There are some serious cooks who now consider the dining-room roast an anachronism. I suggest that they are misguided. Perhaps they can only cook small food?

So my first stop is the THE GORING HOTEL, in Victoria, for luncheon. "The Dining Room" (Mr Goring's preferred nomenclature) is as pleasing a hotel dining-room as one could imagine.

Within its cream-painted, panelled walls, occasional dividing screens separate some of the most widely spaced, dimensionally generous and pristine damask-dressed tables to be found anywhere in London.

Andrew Baker, the smoothest host, seems to purr his way around this convivial, almost club-like room. And to ask of him something slightly astray from the menu causes not the slightest raising of an eyebrow.

Typically, you see, I wished to eat a first-course-size serving of the maincourse, cold poached fillet of wild salmon with a pea-and-mint salad ... but without the new potatoes.

Although the fish was prettily wrapped in thin slices of overlapping, lightly vinegared cucumber "scales" in the quaintly oldfashioned, wedding-buffet style, it was, sadly, over-cooked.

By contrast my friend Michael Birkett's glazed lobster omelette was superb. Constructed in the same fashion as The Savoy Grill's Omelette Arnold Bennett, this small, mottled yellow cushion of a thing was nursery soft and altogether eggy, lobster-rich, imperceptibly cheesy and just-set. It was Michael who was purring now.