Grace and Flavour at Cut

Cut at 45 Park Lane, W1 (020 7493 4554; 45parklane.com)

After a small war with Wolfgang Puck's reservations system, I squeezed my hungry self into his new venture, a well-heeled Park Lane steakhouse called Cut. Seemingly I don't have the booking sway of Angelina and Brad, who slinked in for Sunday lunch two days earlier. In truth I have more empathy with the Wagyu cattle providing the steaks sold at £70 a throw - I, too, am at my best kept in the dark, massaged often and fed on lager.

Cut lives elegantly at the back of the new 45 Park Lane hotel. It's a slender, refined, but slightly faceless, dining room. I perused the menu surrounded by tables of male-only lunch meetings and moneyed tourists. The staff, clad in jet-black tailored garb, like amenable Stormtroopers, were highly attentive. Normally I'd find this testing, but the spectacle of seeing my dining sidekick Sue Perkins, on a day off from filming The Great British Bake Off, having the contents of a mixed bread basket ex-plained intricately to her made my day.

Starters arrived: baby beet salad with Dorstone goat's cheese for me and a Farmer's Market salad for Sue. Both came on long rectangular plates, the ingredients lined up in individual piles, titivated by plate smears and microherbs. I located a baby beet (singular) in mine, four individual centimetre-square pieces of cheese and a slice of something citrus. It was like a teaser-advert for a bloody good salad. We inhaled them in moments.

We drank excellent Malbec and cackled over gossip. But this is a cackle-free zone. We made a pact to 'keep it down', allowing the backing Muzak to envelope the room again. Sue's filet mignon looked, smelled and tasted world class, like truffle. Creamed spinach appeared with an organic fried egg, which they insisted on mashing up for us at eye level. I ate a lobster club sandwich, which at £24 - utterly delicious as it was - might have looked less like a toasted M&S one.

Banana cream pie with 10-year chocolate sauce was pleasant but somewhat forgettable. 'Such a lovely place...' crooned The Eagles as 'Hotel California' piped into the room as we paid up. Cut really is a lovely place. Whether it's a cut above its rivals remains to be proven.