Just a few crumbs of comfort

"Hi there - is that Brian?" Never before have I been called to confirm a restaurant reservation and been addressed by my Christian name.

This carries friendly informality too far; I am wholly in favour of out-at-elbows cardigans at Covent Garden, bare feet in a Rolls-Royce showroom and shirt sleeves in expensive restaurants, but to be called Brian by some Tinkerbell from the Antipodes smacks of too casual an egalitarianism and could easily be taken by the old and the pernickety as plain impertinence.

Having reassured my caller that I was indeed intending to have lunch in The Glade at Sketch on the day devoted to Our Lady of the Sorrows, I fell to wondering if her enquiry implied a waiting-list for every seat and such a racket of neighbouring conversation that softspoken Hermione and I would, literally, not hear ourselves speak. It proved almost so, not quite.

Why The Glade? "You must," said friends. "You'll love it," said friends. "It's just like eating in a fashionable Cork Street gallery," said friends. I am now revising my definition of friendship.

There are, I admit, on the way to The Glade in the bowels of the building, one or two mood-swinging things that might fit in a Tate Modern, but the room itself is less a glade than the tinsel bedroom of a pantomime bride, the sense of "Where the bee sucks, there suck I" entirely lacking - think of white, silver, and wedding-cakes from a patisserie in Plaistow, and you will be close to the mark.

That I should not write reviews of restaurants I am the first to admit, for as a child in London during the Second World War, hunger conditioned my attitude to food; I still think of stoking the boiler in my belly rather than titillating its appetite with delicacies and I demand, for my money, first a reasonable quantity - quality, skill and ingenuity must follow in its train.

The Glade seemed to me, however, to reverse this order and offer the DNA of exquisite food rather than the food itself. Starred dishes on the menu can be had in what are considered hors d'oeuvre quantity; asking for a Mimosa, a confection traditionally of egg-yolks, potato, artichoke hearts and French beans, all chopped small, but in France substantial, Hermione expressed the hope that it would not be too much. "Oh no," came the answer, "we serve it in a champagne glass." And so they did, a mere mouthful for a hungry man.

My helping of mussels and scallops was scarcely larger, indeed I thought it more illusion than reality - exquisite on the tongue, but almost invisible to the questing eye.

Both dishes were served by a kindly bright-eyed nymphet who told us in detail what we were about to eat, her dissertation lasting considerably longer than the time taken to eat them. I felt betrayed by my white hair; she has assumed, I thought, the onset of senility and the total loss of short-term memory, all recollection of the menu, so recently and carefully considered, wiped from our minds; she has been trained, I thought, not in a Swiss Fachschule (the best of all educations for a waitress), but in an old people's home in Ponders End.

Hermione then unfolded a ballottine of smoked chicken barely three centimetres in diameter, Rhode Island Red the breed, fresh sap-filled branches of walnut the timber burned to make the smoke - at least I think this is what we heard through the chatter of our neighbours; Hermione nodded and smiled her silent encouragement - as did I when the wing of an infant skate, done to death by some Ahab off the Needles, was set before me.