Sublime time at the Tate

Waiting for my guest in the restaurant of Tate Britain (why are the young now invariably late?), I realised how pointless it is to decorate a dining room with murals. For 18 months or so in 1926 and 1927, Rex Whistler, five years younger than the century and just out of the Slade School, was paid £5 a week by Joseph Duveen, that scoundrelly supporter of the Tate Gallery in its first incarnation, to paint the walls of its new refreshment room. The witty boy devised a mediaeval romance in modern dress, a whimsical Elysium in which a genteel hunting party drifts through a landscape inspired by great English gardens, In Pursuit of Rare Meats, the mural's title.

To get the point of this art of urbane reference one must be as clever as Whistler himself, but diners on my day there were not - I saw not one look about him as he entered and not one fork paused mid-air as its openmouthed manipulator recognised a stray motif among the allusions all about him.

I paid Whistler due compliment and ate rare rump of lamb (£18.95), the thick pink slices reclining prettily on a bed of pale green beans. My measure of adequacy on these occasions is the appetite of teenage godsons and there was, unusually, lamb enough; my only grumble, and it was scarcely that, was the absence of even a hint of garlic, but perhaps a sedate restaurant in London is not the place of the seductive whiff, let alone the rough rasp and gasp of garlic that is the certain pleasure of a workman's café in Marseille.

My godson unaccountably chose a fishcake and swore that it was good (at £14.95 it was certainly large) - but why the devil eat a fishcake as a treat when they are two a penny in Marks and Sparks? That it came with pea purée and wilted spinach suggests the chef is cripplingly aware of the Englishman's addiction to the food as well as other customs of the nursery.

I began with chorizo, the special starter of the day, and have not the slightest recollection of it, yet I remember with absolute clarity the chorizo nibbled in a bar in Burgos four full years ago. Young Pamphilo chose asparagus - and what is there to say of that?

It looked like asparagus, smelled like asparagus and, served with butter, was asparagus; he ate it with apparent relish and I imagine that, later, his urine smelled of it, but did not ask. We shared a salad of tomatoes and shallots - crisp and sharp and excellent - and a dish of Jersey Royals so good that, had I had a doggy bag, I would have taken home the three left over.

We ended with ill-assorted puddings (each £5.50) - ill-assorted in that he chose a sorbet (again, what is there to say of that?), and I a trifle, the perfect pudding for a lusty godson. It came in a tall glass, with a long spoon with which to probe soggy layer after soggy layer of squidgy anonymities and custard. The years fell away as I ate it - it lasted much longer than the sorbet - and I needed a fierce espresso to remind me that I am no longer 15 and wearing a straw boater.

Our waitress, too, reminded me of times past - she cared. She commended a decent rosé - a wine that I would never trust from an unfamiliar list - and her response to my plaint that there were no crusts in the bread basket was to return with more freshly cut ends of loaves than we could eat. Most waiters greet the suggestion that one might eat a crust with incomprehension and disbelief, and thereafter treat one as an escapee from Bedlam.

The bill was £85; we had eaten in two hours as much as young Whistler's murals had earned him in 17 weeks - how's that for a measure of inflation?

Tate Britain
Millbank, SW1 4RG