Tasty joint for the gents

The first time I was invited to The Guinea Grill, I was very reluctant to go. The person who invited me - a Chilean oil trader - has a particular penchant for exotic food and I assumed that the cuisine on offer was from Papua New Guinea.

Would I be expected to eat monkey brains and elephant testicles? I told him that squirrel stew at St John was about as exotic as I was prepared to get.

Of course, I was completely wrong. The reason this pub-based steakhouse is called The Guinea Grill is because, back when it opened in 1952, you could buy a slap-up meal for a guinea. Needless to say, times have changed.

These days, a two-course meal accompanied by a bottle of water and a glass of wine will set you back at least £50. Indeed, it may even qualify as the most expensive gastropub in London.

The reason it can get away with charging these prices is because it's situated in Bruton Place, just off Berkeley Square, and its clientele is almost exclusively hedge-fund managers, property developers, merchant bankers and, of course, oil traders. A better name for this place would be The Millionaire's Grill.

Its great virtue is that it serves some of the best beef in the city. 'Beef is a good meate for an Englyssheman,' wrote Andrew Boorde in his A Compendyous Regyment or A Dyetary of Helth in 1542, and even today, beef is associated with dominant alpha males.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more masculine atmosphere than the dining room of The Guinea Grill on a Friday lunchtime. To paraphrase PG Wodehouse, pinstriped young men greet each other like mastodons bellowing out across the primeval swamps - and that's nothing compared to the volume they use when talking on their mobiles. It's less like a posh restaurant than the trading floor of the Stock Exchange.

When it first opened 54 years ago, The Guinea Grill put a tent up in the back garden and earmarked that as the main dining area, but today that area has been walled off, creating a fairly basic space. The décor is what you'd expect in a place like this: dark, tobacco-stained, wood panels, broken up by the occasional seascape.

If you venture into the gents, you'll see some of the accolades this restaurant has won, poking out from behind dusty frames: 'Winner, National Steak and Kidney Pie Championships, 1991'; 'Finalist, Pub Sandwich of the Year, 1993'; 'Publican Award, Catering Pub of the Year, 1995'.

I suppose I should have tried one of the prizewinning steak and kidney pies, but after the effort I'd made to fight my way to the table, I thought I deserved something a bit fancier. Instead, I opted for a starter of Mediterranean prawns, followed by the mixed grill, while my companion - a property developer, no less - started with oysters and then had a 16oz sirloin steak.