Grace and Flavour: Colbert

If you’re planning to plod soberly through January, eating steamed bark with wild rice and bleating on about it, don’t do it near me.

I find your detox tedious. January is a vile month. Mark my words, you’ll need a stiff gin when your credit card bill appears, revealing that some utter berk ran around Selfridges on 23 December guilt-buying costly candles and Olly Murs autobiographies.

I spent the holidays in Cumbria and Aldeburgh, being very festive but, as always, vaguely missing London, the most fantastic city on earth. Yes, it’s sometimes frustrating and dirty and depressing but it’s never, ever boring.

My first Grace and Flavour for 2013 is Colbert on Sloane Square, the new all-dayer from Corbin and King, fathers of The Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel, ‘inspired by the great boulevard cafés of Paris’. Red leather banquettes, wood panelling, vintage film posters, tiled floors, bespoke cornicing, plaster friezes, chandeliers, a continuous supply of pain au chocolat and cannelé bordelais, navarin d’agneau, saumon grillé aux champignons sauvages, pan-fried veal schnitzel, steak Diane and croque Provençale. Peruse the menu online and then come to me with your "detox" intentions.

Colbert is both oddly snooty yet wildly reminiscent of the place René Artois owned in the 1980s BBC One laugh riot ’Allo ’Allo!, which I watched an awful lot of when I lived in the North — the alternative being to bang a bus shelter with a stick or be asleep. Colbert is slap bang next door to the Tube station, so a brilliant place for Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Chelsea types to hook up with their less rich friends from, say, Hackney, without the deep shame of actually taking them to a local bar. Colbert is also within a boozy lunch/shopping totter of the King’s Road, and within coughing distance of Peter Jones (which perhaps you remember from running through it panic purchasing like a lunatic on 24 December).

Of course, Colbert is so conveniently situated and so brimming with food that is neither cheap nor show-stopping but delicious and comforting that you won’t be able to get a booking. In fact, perhaps give up now. I felt like abandoning hope many times when trying to get a table. When I did arrive for my table for two at 1pm on a Wednesday, I found the staff in the lobby embarking on a charming form of crowd control. I took my friend, the actor and writer Chris Coghill, who’d recently finished work on Spike Island, the Stone Roses-centred rite-de-passage movie. We frittered away time like good Northern folk tend to, drinking booze and conspiring over tattoos, cars and people of whom we wildly disapprove.

We ate the soupe du jour, formed of something long-winded, with blitzed hazelnuts, shallots and shellfish, which sounded odd but was starkly excellent. I ate chicken paillard with a salad of fennel, rocket, radish and tarragon — delicious, albeit accompanied by a mountain of rocket that not even Darius the world’s biggest rabbit could have finished. This week I might go to the same place as my friends who are being hypnotised to stop drinking, smoking and sniffing Cif, to be hypnotised to stop ordering rocket. It is just nettles by another name.

The clientele was 100 per cent indigenous Knightsbridge time-rich mummies and grand-mummies, some arty or media business lunchers, no tourists, no riffraff, many facelifts, lots of fur trims, pearls and expressions of lives languidly and gloriously lived. If it was easier to get a table, I’d wash up here a lot. I had a slab of prune and almond tarte du jour that was fresh and sticky and disappeared so quickly I had to double-check I hadn’t lost a fingernail in the process. We ordered double espressos, which appeared at the table lukewarm, and were presented with a bill just short of £100. This is all so perfectly London: pricey, imperfect, exclusive, hard to gain entry to and like something out of a sitcom. But I know that when hunger strikes anywhere close to SW1, I’ll be back.