The following piece of mine is in today's Times:

I have never eaten a Velázquez. Or a Picasso, come to that. But I have eaten an Adrià. And it was pretty tasty.

Never heard of the Spanish artist Ferran Adrià? He’s based in Roses, on the Costa Brava. And the reason you might not have heard of him is that he’s usually described as a chef. Not just a chef, mind, but the chef: last month his restaurant, El Bulli, was voted the best in the world by Restaurant magazine. Other chefs refer to him as the greatest.

Next month Adrià will break new ground even for him: he has been invited to exhibit his food at the five-yearly Documentaart show in Kassel, Germany – one of the biggest events in the world of contemporary art. The invitation has, predictably, caused uproar in the art world. José de la Sota, art critic of El PaÍs, put it this way: “Adrià is not Picasso. Picasso did not know how to cook but he was better than Adrià [at art]. What is art now? Is it something or nothing?”

He might indeed ask: many of us have been wondering for quite a while, when we see elephant dung, protest banners and piles of bricks winning art prizes. Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of modern art, defined it as “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself”. That seems to me as good a definition of Adrià’s style of food as any I have read. El Bulli is the home of what has been called “molecular gastronomy”. It opens for six months a year. In the six winter months when it is shut, Adrià and his fellow chefs work in their laboratory in Barcelona, deconstructing and then reassembling food and combinations in all sorts of experimental ways.

The point of Adrià’s food (the same holds for Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in Berkshire) is to remain true to the essence of an ingredient but to let us see it and taste it in a new light. Our expectations are confounded and we see what we are eating in a new way. That is a truly artistic experience. Adrià’s technical skills are unsurpassed and he puts most traditional chefs to shame in his mastery of their techniques. With that as his foundation, he then goes back to the essentials and starts again.

Take the margarita I was offered when I arrived at El Bulli. The “glass” was a square block of ice with a hole in the centre: on top was a foam of olives, with shards of margarita ice underneath. The canapés looked like four biscuits. The Oreo chocolate cream was two pieces of olive biscuit with a yogurt cream, the marshmallow was not coconut but parmesan, and the crunchy rice crispy biscuit was made of quinoa with almonds. Then there was a popcorn foam – literally, foam that tasted of popcorn – accompanied by a tiny ball of caramelised liquid pumpkin dusted with gold leaf. The box of caviar turned out to be intense, tiny balls of jellified melon . . . and on it goes, unexpected dish after logic-questioning dish.

Adrià reacts to the criticism from the Spanish art establishment thus: “True, I am no Picasso, but what is art in times like these? Many people act as if I should apologise for participating. I am not going to. I understand there might be people who are annoyed. It’s tough to see a cook get invited to this. But what is art? If they want to call what I do art, fine. If not, that’s fine too.”

Spot on. In an art world where anything seems to go, I can’t for the life of me see why Ferran Adrià’s food, which fulfils every criterion of modern art, should not take its place alongside the likes of Tracey Emin.

Come to think of it, shouldn’t it be the woman whose contribution to art is an unmade bed whose place in the exhibition should be in question? Why is that art, but Adrià’s not? The food at El Bulli is certainly a lot more elevating to look at.

Blimey. I've just been to the new Baker and Spice round the corner from my flat.

As some of you may recall, I do not object to paying what some people see as silly money for superb food.

But I do object to paying silly money for average food. The food at Baker and Spice is good. The bread is delicious, the quiche well made, the salads fresh and interesting. But the prices! Have a guess. How much do you think a glass of orange juice cost?

£3? Come off it.

£4? As if!

£5? Surely not.

£6? No way.

£6.50.

I doubt they charge that even at Le Gavroche.

A plate of beef? £14 and it was, literally, a plate with a few pieces of beef on it. All vegetables were extra, at £4.95 each.

I wasn't paying. And I won't be going back. But good luck to them if they can find people prepared to fork out £6.50 for a glass of orange juice. There's one born every minute, as they say.

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Tim Worstall has some devastating news.

I have to confess that about twice a year I get a craving for Marmite. It's actually a palate killer, since it overpowers everything else. But every so often some good rubbish food is what is called for. Accompanied, perhaps, by Dairylea on Mothers' Pride. Yuck.

I think I have just coined a new word. Emailing a friend who eats in even more high-class restaurants than I manage, and who likes to spread her culinary favours amongst a variety of places, I called her a gastroslut.

The question is, can anyone think of a male equivalent?

(There was a spelling mistake here before, as commented on!)

UPDATE: Some suggested words:

Gastroslob

Michael Winner

and the one which does it for me: Gastrigolo

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Alan Bennett, on Nigel Slater's A Taste of My Life:

The trouble with coooking is you go to all that trouble cooking elaborate meals, and all people do is eat them.

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There's a lovely tribute to the Oxford don, Jeremy Catto, in this week's Spectator.

I have one particular reason to be grateful to him. Until my final year at Oxford, I hated whisky. To me, it was a horrible, deeply unpleasant, fiery drink. I couldn't understand why anyone would drink it for pleasure.

Dr Catto invited me to dinner at Oriel one night. After the meal, he insisted that I drink whisky with him, and simply refused to accept that I might not like it. My memory of that night is understandably shaky; not because it was 19 years ago, but because his method of persuading me that whisky was a wonderful pleasure was to pour me glasses of every whisky in the Oriel SCR and show me what I was missing. Suffice it to say that there were many more varieties than one would find in the average off licence.

I doubt if I was that grateful to him the next morning, but from that moment on I was alive to the many subtleties and pleasures which whisky contains. And for that, I must thank Jeremy Catto.

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Awards for restaurants are almost meaningless. The perfect omelette and chips is, in its own way, as deserving of praise as any of the restaurants in last night’s top fifty. But ask almost any serious chef whom he – they are mostly hes – most respects and the response will almost always be Ferran Adrià. Joel Robuchon, a legend in French gastronomy, calls Adrià “the best cook on the planet”.

Whether El Bulli ‘deserves’ this year to be back in top spot, and The Fat Duck down to second, is a pointless question. What matters is that both are uniquely wonderful restaurants, serving glorious food to customers every day. Eat in any of the top fifty and you will have an exceptional experience.

I am lucky enough to have eaten in Restaurant’s Top Three, and many others beside. I could tell you that the meal at The French Laundry in California was the most perfect of all I have ever eaten, that the butter and greens alone at Arpege in Paris made the €328 cost worth it, and that The Fat Duck far exceeded my already over the top expectations.

But for the entire experience, and for the memories and thoughts with which it left me, the meal I ate at El Bulli was in a different dimension. I put in my mouth dishes which no human being had, until they emerged from Adrià’s laboratory a few weeks earlier, ever contemplated. I experienced sensations which I had not realised were possible. And I did so in a building which seemed more natural, less pretentious, less stuffy and more comfortable than any other restaurant I have ever entered.

El Bulli’s USP is the reinvention of food and taste. My favourite of the 27 courses sounds ridiculous but was anything but. The ‘Tierra 2005’ consisted of a polystyrene box, with a mound of parmesan foam inside. It was as full of flavour as any meat. To add to it I was given a bag of “raspberry muesli”. The combination was breathtaking.

El Bulli only opens between April and September. The rest of the year the chefs spend in a laboratory in Barcelona, where they deconstruct food and the process of cooking. Adria’s technique is known as molecular gastronomy, because as well being some of the most technically accomplished cooks in the world, his chefs are also food scientists, experimenting and learning, and then delivering the results of their research to the customers the following season.

Last year there were 200 applications for every table every night. If you want the experience of a life time, the only option is to keep trying. It worked for me – after five years.

My quest is over. Not for me the pointlessness of climbing mountains just because they are there, or running marathons for the sake of running marathons. Over the past few months, I have dedicated myself — and my body — to a far more important and worthwhile task.

I have eaten.

Not just anywhere. I have been on a quest to discover the finest restaurant in the world. I would like to be able to tell you that I had the idea of benefiting humanity in some way as my driving force, or that there was some other deep purpose underlying my task. There wasn’t. The sole purpose of my quest has been pleasure — my pleasure.

The three restaurants that comprise my shortlist — which are regularly hailed as the three greatest on earth — are all, by definition, busy. They are booked solidly, and most would-be diners complain that it is impossible to get a table.

It isn’t. I pulled no strings to eat anywhere. None of them knew I would be writing about them. If you like what you read about them, and you want to eat there, you can. All you need is determination — and a little ingenuity — to get a reservation.

I began my quest at the Fat Duck, in Bray, Berkshire, which this year was voted by Restaurant magazine as the greatest restaurant on the planet. I followed up at El Bulli, where the Spanish magician Ferran Adria, regularly hailed by his peers as the greatest chef alive, performs alchemy on his ingredients. I concluded last month at the French Laundry in California. Both Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck and Adria are proponents of what has come to be labelled “molecular gastronomy”, which applies the principles of chemistry and physics to cooking, stripping away tradition and preconceptions and experimenting in a laboratory rather than a kitchen to see what works.

It’s easy to satirise such cooking, and in the hands of second order chefs it can be truly disgusting. The case for the prosecution: brussels sprouts soufflé in a whisky jelly (I kid you not). But in the hands of a master, the altered perceptions can be not only revelatory but joyous. One of Blumenthal’s classics, for instance, Sardine on Toast Sorbet, Ballotine of Mackerel “Invertebrate”, Marinated Daikon may sound bizarre, but as soon as you eat it you realise how limited we are to think of sorbet and sardines but never to put them together.

For all Blumenthal’s skill, the home of such cooking is El Bulli, on the Costa Brava. So legendary is it now — it opens for just half the year, with no more than 50 covers — that it has to turn away 400,000 requests for a table every year. I had been trying for five years to get a reservation. Clearly the food gods knew that this was the year of my quest, as my pleading e-mail was picked at random for a table in April.

I have already described the experience in its full glory to Times2 readers, so I will limit myself here to saying that El Bulli is far, far more than the showcase for a series of lab experiments. The ambience is one of total comfort, without the reverential — and off-putting — hush that some ostensibly great restaurants seem to encourage. The Spanish enjoy their food, and they take that enjoyment into even the most rarified of restaurants. Adria is able to redefine what it means to be a chef, and to take his profession in new directions, only because he is already so technically accomplished. I suspect that some “great” chefs would struggle to cook a bare omelette. Adria’s would be perfection.

If told I had to erase all memories of either the Fat Duck or El Bulli, I would struggle to decide which to lose. It’s difficult to judge the food on its own; as with any meal, the context is also pivotal. I went to the Fat Duck for my 40th birthday and to El Bulli after five years of trying.

In the end, the difference seemed that El Bulli deliberately serves its food as experiments in progress, while the Fat Duck approaches the same end — reinvention — with the determination that only dishes that have already been proved to succeed can be served. As to which is better — so what? I care even less now because, glorious as they both are, I realised from my very first mouthful at the French Laundry that I had found perfection. Indeed, I had an inkling even before I entered the building. Yountville, in the Napa Valley, is not merely picture-postcard pretty; it lives and breathes. The streets are spotless. Everyone smiles. The scenery — vineyards on rolling hills — is majestic. And, best of all, the residents, and the town, are real.

So the French Laundry has an immediate advantage; it is impossible to be in Yountville and not feel relaxed and happy.

But what matters is the food. Thomas Keller, the chef at the French Laundry, works very differently from Blumenthal and Adria. He grows and rears as much of his produce as possible, and aims at the most simple perfection — presenting ingredients in the best possible light. Interesting and unusual combinations, yes, but all designed to bring out the heart of flavours.

I had the nine-course tasting menu. Every course was a highlight, the menu perfectly balanced to mix the rich with the delicate, the piquant with the smooth. Sautéed Fillet of Chehalis River Sturgeon, with Marinated Sweet 100 Tomatoes, French Laundry Garden Tomato “Marmelade”, Fleur de Courgette Croquante and Yellow Squash Emulsion typified what makes the French Laundry the finest restaurant on earth: the best possible ingredients, cooked only to show off their quality, rather than the chef’s invention.

Desserts are, for me, usually a depressing indication that a good meal is ending, not least because I do not have a sweet tooth. But the Mango Sorbet, Yuzu-Scented “Genoise”, Goma “Nougatine” and Black Sesame “Coulis” would itself have changed my mind, so heavenly was the sorbet, if it had not been followed by a chocolate mousse and vanilla ice-cream (to reduce so sophisticated a dish to banality), which has stopped me eating chocolate or ice-cream since. I know already that I will never eat its like again, and cannot see the point of eating anything lesser. I lied slightly in my first sentence. My quest is far from over. I am not going to stop searching for the best food and the best chefs. But the quest has changed. Until the French Laundry, I had eaten meals which would live with me for ever and which I knew were near-perfect. But I always had the thought that somewhere out there was the mythical absolutely perfect. At the French Laundry, I realised for the first time that it is no myth. It exists. Now I know what perfection tastes — and looks — like.

So now I have a real yardstick for comparison. And that, I think, makes my quest even more intense.

This is not a sentiment I thought I would express, nor expect to again: Jacques Chirac is right.

According to the French President, “the only thing that they (the Brits) have ever done for European agriculture is ‘mad cow’ disease. You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.”

Let’s ignore the chutzpah of a President of France criticising another country for untrustworthiness. And let’s forget the irony of his having uttered his words to the German Chancellor and the Russian President. When was the last time you craved Russian food, or felt like popping out for some German?

Painful as it is to admit, however, in all material respects, M Chirac is the full soufflé.

Predictably, the reaction to his comments has been one of affronted outrage. How typically arrogant! How typically French! British chefs have lined up to point out the vibrancy of the London restaurant scene, and how there has been a revolution in British dining in the past decade.

Indeed so. There are some wonderful places to eat now. And, at the top half of the scale, I would rather eat in creative London than stultifying Paris any day. But the operative words are “some” and “the top half”. For every Gordon Ramsay and Giorgio Locatelli, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of slop merchants, who charge a small fortune for food which is barely edible.

Set foot in an average British restaurant and you will be lucky to find a course worth eating. And it is getting steadily worse, not better. As home cooking dies, replaced with tasteless, additive-ridden, cook-chill plastic, our taste buds are losing what little discrimination they might have had. When the microwaved frozen produce of pizza and pasta chains is the height of culinary standards, as it is for many, we should hang our heads in comestible shame.

As for our native dishes, roast beef can certainly be wonderful, as can bread and butter pudding. And who is not partial to fish and chips? But the notion that staple British dishes stand comparison with French, or Italian, is simply risible.

My neighbourhood bistro in Brussels offers delicious steak, vegetables and a carafe of bordeaux for around 18 euros. Here, it would cost twice as much and be inedible. Chirac may be a byword for “wrong”. But on this one, he’s spot on.

This blog speaks. Action follows:

Christian Delouvrier, is now the former Alain Ducasse at the Essex House (155 W. 58th St.) culinary star. Delouvrier has been replaced by Tony Esnault.

From today's Observer leader:

The provision of universal schooling in a healthy and stable environment is one of the few things that everyone agrees should be provided by the state.

Eh? Everyone in Oberver-land, perhaps, but not in the outside world. I'm struggling to think of a single reason why "the provision of universal schooling" should be in the hands of the state.

The economist Paul Ormerod has just published a fascinating book, Why Most Things Fail. His thesis is that failure is a necessary prerequisite of success. Out of failure come the building bricks of achievement. I have no idea if he has ever heard of El Bulli, a restaurant on the Costa Brava, but as I ate there last week I realised that the food in front of me was the perfect example of his thesis.

To describe El Bulli as “a restaurant” is like calling Shakespeare “a writer”. Not only does it have three Michelin stars; consistently, it is described by chefs as the greatest restaurant in the world, and its presiding genius, Ferran Adrià, as the greatest chef in the world. Joel Robuchon, the legendary French chef, has called Adrià “the best cook on the planet”.

The particular lure of El Bulli is not its stunning location in the mountains. It is not the Rolls-Royce service. And it is not the unrivalled technical skill in the cooking. All of those combine to make the El Bulli experience magical. But what makes it unique is that the food itself is unique.

El Bulli does not serve food as you and I know it. In the six winter months when El Bulli is shut, Adrià and his team decamp to Barcelona, where he has a laboratory. Those six months are spent deconstructing food to what sometimes seems like its atomic elements, and then reassembling in a very different way.

Any charlatan can offer up a bizarre menu, most gloriously satirised in Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, in which the main character’s new restaurant, the Regret Rien, included such delights as “liver and lager”. Adrià alters perceptions but remains true to the spirit of an ingredient, a skill he shares with Heston Blumenthal, whose restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, has just been voted best in the world in the annual Top 50 published by Restaurant magazine. The point of El Bulli is to confound expectations — to push the barriers of food to its limits, and beyond. At the very least, it forces you to reassess what an ingredient is for. At best, it is revelatory. The experiment does not always work. Sometimes, in other words, it fails. But without that failure, there would be no success.

It is almost impossible to get a table at El Bulli. It is open only from April to October and has fewer than 50 covers. It opens only for dinner, and has only one sitting. El Bulli takes around 2,000 bookings a year. Last year it had more than 400,000 applications, meaning that the chances of getting a table are roughly one in 200. For the past five years I have been trying, to no avail. I say the same thing every time: I ’ll take a table for any number of people on any night. Last October I e-mailed to inquire about this year. A few weeks later I received a reply: “If you like we can make your dinner reservation on Wednesday April 13, 2005 for two people at 8.30pm under the name: Stephen Pollard.”

I liked.

And so, last week, I flew with my girlfriend to Spain for dinner.

El Bulli, where Adrià began cooking in 1984 (having started out washing up in the kitchen) is near the town of Roses, a two-hour drive from Barcelona. Appropriately, the village of Cadaqués, where Dalí lived, is also near by; Adrià’s food can be equally surreal.

The meal we ate consisted of 27 courses, many no more than a spoonful, others of a normal size but decidedly not normal in their composition. There is no choice — Adrià has, after all, spent six months working on each year’s menu. It costs €155 a head. Considering that, on a supply-and-demand formula, he could charge at least double and still sell out every year, it is perhaps the greatest restaurant bargain.

After a hair-raising 15-minute drive through the mountains, along the only approach road, we arrived at El Bulli, a haven of calm in the rough mountains, with the ocean pounding against the rocks. Carved into the side of the restaurant is a large glass wall, so that the kitchen is on full view to the outside. We were offered a kitchen tour as we entered. I have seen a fair few, but never before have I encountered one so serene, and so sparklingly clean, with every chef so clearly in control of their station. So organised was the service that it was difficult to see any cooking going on.

Adrià offered us a “good evening, enjoy your meal”, and we were led to the table and handed a margarita. The “glass” was a square block of ice with a hole in the centre. On top was a foam of olives, with shards of margarita ice underneath.

The foam (espuma) is a signature trick of Adrià’s. Using nitrous oxide in canisters, Adrià pours in liquids and gelatine and pours out a variety of flavours, from orange to foie gras.

Next, we were served olives, one on each spoon. Except that they weren’t olives. They were a kind of soft, exploding olive jelly, which looked and tasted like an olive but were instead the first of many jellies. This year, it seems, Adrià has become obsessed with jellifying ingredients, and with the sensuality of food.

Every course was in some way slippery, shiny or smooth.

To complete the disconcerting canapés came what looked like four biscuits. The Oreo chocolate cream turned out to be two pieces of olive biscuit with a yogurt cream, the marshmallow was not coconut but parmesan and the crunchy-rice crispy biscuit was made of quinoa with almonds. The pièce de résistance was the popcorn foam — literally, foam that tasted of popcorn — accompanied by a tiny ball of caramelised liquid pumpkin, dusted with gold leaf.
The waiter then presented us with a metal box of caviar. Inside, dozens of tiny luminous spheres begged to be eaten. But they were not, of course, caviar. They were tiny balls of jellified melon (with a few passion fruit pips), each one a palate-refreshing burst.

The next dish was one of the most bizarre of the night: a kind of pistachio ice-cream. We were told to eat it in two bites. Waiters play a critical part in the El Bulli experience, not merely in making the staggered feeding of 27 courses to 15 tables run like clockwork, but in the instructions on how to eat the food. Eat in one mouthful, we were told sometimes; start at the top and eat each part of the dish separately; eat everything together. Every course has a special instruction.

If I had a favourite course it was the Tierra 2005, which came in a polystyrene box. Inside was a mound of parmesan foam, as rich, flavoursome and filling as any beef fillet. We were handed a small plastic bag of “raspberry muesli”, which we were told to mix with the foam. The combination of raspberry and parmesan is simply sensational, the sharp dried raspberry perfectly setting off the intensity of the parmesan.

By now I wondered if we were being given too many flavours to absorb. The parmesan was so filling that I could not imagine what would come next; we were barely halfway through.

But Adrià knows just what he is doing. The small deep-green ball which we were told to eat in one mouthful was a layer of pea jelly encasing a pea soup which popped in our mouths. Accompanying it were half a dozen of the most perfect sweet peas served as a salad on a spoon to be downed in one. It prepared us for the next course: shaved dried foie gras, almonds and cocoa, atop Adrià’s take on porridge.

The next course, butter ravioli, was breathtaking. When the waiter announced its arrival I was apprehensive. But the half-inch squares of pasta, with a silky clarified butter filling, were exquisite. The food then moved up a gear, the courses becoming more complex. Succulent white asparagus was presented with olive oil gnocchi — light, delicate balls of olive oil. They were followed by duck sweetbreads, each no bigger than a shirt button, served on a tube of piped cream.

The most difficult sommelier’s job in the world must be that at El Bulli. No one wine can possibly match such a variety of flavours. And while it is possible to spend a fortune on wine, our wonderful sommelier recommended a series of very reasonable ones. I asked him for out-of-the-way bottles that could not be found in Britain. The white rioja (€50, and more than double the cost of anything else he gave us) was perfect, seeming to change character with every course.

Next, the verduras à la oriental was a bowl of perfectly al dente vegetables in a clear “oriental” broth, designed to prepare the palette for the smoked scampi with green tea “air” on top of it. Yes, air. Lighter even than the foams, Adrià’s “flavoured air” appears to have no body to it at all, but simply to be the very essence of flavour.

With the next course, salt fish, I began to wilt. Until now, the balance of flavours and sizes meant that just when you think you are too full, your appetite springs into action once more. But there was now no let-up, and the lamb’s brains that followed were simply too filling. I could not countenance any more food.

Or so I thought. The first dessert, orange and mandarin foam on top of an olive oil jelly, was perhaps the most refreshing dish I have ever eaten. It was a spring-clean of my senses. And it made me realise that it is not one’s stomach that fills up at El Bulli, it is one’s brain. There are so many different flavours, textures and combinations that the mind finds it difficult not to suffer sensory overload.

But the desserts were pure joy, the most outstanding of which were the “praline frost” and a nitrogen frozen ball of passion fruit, made at our table.

For dessert, our sommelier poured us a rare Spanish wine; he begged: “Do not tell anyone in London we have it” lest everyone ask for it and his supplies disappear. When I realised that we had drunk almost the entire bottle, I panicked — Lord knows how much so rare a sweet wine would cost. When the bill came, I simply could not believe it. We had been charged 12 euros each, the cost — astonishingly cheap in itself — of a glass.

The bill came to €467 (£318). For an experience that will change the way I think about food, as well as being a stunning meal, it was a steal — not perfect, but that is the secret. Adrià experiments with food. And without the ability to fail, no barrier is pushed forward. His failures dwarf most chefs’ successes.

I might have only a one in 200 chance of getting back, but that won’t stop me trying for next year.

Given the choice between standing in the middle of one of the worst blizzards of the past hundred years and eating in one of the most expensive, renowned restaurants in the world, for which would you opt?

Having done both, I would unhesitatingly opt for the former.

My girlfriend and I were in New York. As a treat, I booked a restaurant which I had long been desperate to try: Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. Ducasse is the only chef in the world to possess six Michelin stars: three for his restaurant in Paris and three in Monte Carlo. To put that achievement in perspective, there are only three 3-starred restaurants in the whole of the UK — The Fat Duck, The Waterside Inn, and Gordon Ramsay. M Ducasse is clearly some chef.

He opened his New York venue in 2000. As William Grimes, the former restaurant critic of The New York Times and thus arbiter of all things foodie, put it: “In the annals of New York dining, few events compare with the tempestuous arrival of Alain Ducasse in New York . . . it was more expensive, more sumptuous, more ritualised — more everything — than any other restaurant in Manhattan, where the worship of fine French food is an organised religion. Ducasse would be the restaurant that made the others also-rans.”

I wanted part of the action, and booked a table.

Come Saturday, we were ensconced in our New York hotel when we spied delightful snowflakes. How pretty. How romantic. Within minutes, the flakes turned to lumps, and a light coating turned to inches. Wall-to-wall TV coverage of “Blizzard 2005” reported that the storm was one of the three worst of the past 150 years, if not the worst of the past century. The Mayor of New York appeared on TV: unless your journey is critical, stay at home, for your safety and the city’s.

Clearly, Mayor Bloomberg had our dinner plans specifically in mind. He was, in effect, telling us to do whatever it would take to get to the restaurant. What, after all, could be more critical than a visit to Alain Ducasse at the Essex House? And in New York, it is the restaurants that hold the upper hand. As the snow was settling, I overheard an archetypal New Yorker on the phone: “No, 6.15 is no good. My massage doesn’t finish until 6.30. There’s a blizzard. Won’t they bend in a blizzard?”

Blizzard, schmizzard. No mere snowstorm was going to destroy our night, and we made it in good time.

The mere fact of getting there meant that it was round one to us; but it was the only round we were going to win. In the battle that was to follow, the surly Frenchman and his henchmen won by a knockout.

Now, an admission. Alain Ducasse at the Essex House is far from my only experience of haute cuisine. Given a one-off expedition to such a restaurant, I almost always choose the tasting menu — as I did at the Fat Duck last month, to wonderful, memorable effect. They do not come cheap. At the Fat Duck it’s £90. M Ducasse’s pride and joy is $225. Thanks to the dollar’s collapse, that’s just — just! — £120. But to be given a guided tour through the chef’s paces, and to be placed in his hands — how he balances ingredients, how he structures courses, and how he creates an overall style — it is worth every penny.

Usually.

Given the outrageous mark-ups on the wine list — a form of civilised mugging — I opted for the sommelier’s selection of glasses to go with each course at a mere $120 (£64). I was not offered a price on the next choice: one of 12 bottles of water (six still, six sparkling).

I chose the blue bottle. It was a nice colour.

Our first course — creamy pumpkin soup, with a “fricassée” of crushed chestnut — arrived. The fact that it arrived within what seemed a split second of our ordering the tasting menu should have put me on my guard. But I was complacent. Far, far, too complacent, it soon became clear.

It was gorgeous, albeit almost as heavy as me. It was also unaccompanied by any wine. I called over the waiter to point out that we had just finished our first course, that we had a set of wine glasses on the table but that that they were all empty. When, I asked, would our wine be coming?

Let the games begin. He looked at me as if I had stepped in from a trailer park. “That was not your first course.” Long pause. It might have been listed on the menu. It might have tasted like food, but no, it was not. “That was your amuse-bouche”. But of course! The fact that we had already been given a little choux bun as an amuse-bouche and that it was an entire bowl of soup — not, as it were, a soupç on of soup — was irrelevant. I was clearly stupid.
Within seconds of our plates being cleared, the second course arrived — carpaccio of blue-fin tuna, with eggplant caviar. It was stunning; moist, fresh and flavoursome. Our plates cleared, there was barely a minute’s pause before the arrival of the third course. The “Poêlé duck foie gras, caramelised mango and its marmalade” was, however, the beginning of the end. With its arrival, I understood what it feels like to be a duck being force-fed to produce foie gras.

I have a healthy appetite. I am used to “fine dining” and can scoff with the best of them. But I am equally used to tasting menus, and the point of a tasting menu is to be balanced, and to be a pleasure, not an ordeal. It was a slab so large that a team of elephants reared specifically to eat foie gras would have conceded defeat, paired with the largest half of a roasted mango I have ever seen. And all this — an entire bowl of rich pumpkin soup, the tuna, a roasted mango, and enough foie gras to keep me in clover for the next 25 years — within less than 30 minutes of our setting foot in the restaurant.

By now, Nicky was beginning to wilt — not least because the room felt like a sauna. As a frequent visitor to the US, I know that Americans like their rooms warmer than we do, but this was something else. She was wearing a light top, with bare arms, and yet the heat was so oppressive that she could barely keep her eyes open.

I was obeying the orders I had been given on booking; I was wearing my jacket and tie. I couldn’t cope with the heat either, so wandered off to the loo to wash my face. As I walked back, I noticed a fellow diner. He was wearing a V-neck sweater. No shirt, no jacket. I removed my tie. I was not thrown out.

As we picked our way through the foie gras, the meal began to turn into something to be endured. Our stomachs could barely cope with the food, our bodies with the heat and our tempers with the superior service.

I suggested to Nicky that she step outside for some air. The fact that the worst blizzard of the past century was at its height was not a downside. That was the very point. It was preferable to the atmosphere inside.

On to the next course — “wild Alaskan salmon, lightly cooked, béarnaise reduction”. So far, it was not the quality of the food that had ruined the evening. The salmon, however, was a disgrace — overcooked and dry, utterly flavourless and crumbling as soon as it was touched by a fork. Still, at least I know that I cook better salmon than Alain Ducasse’s kitchen staff.

By now, we had been eating barely a third of the food on our plates. Call me an idiot, but I was determined not to complain and instead to see what it would take — heart failure, perhaps? — to interrupt the onward march of the food. How much would we have to leave before they made the inquiry, “Is everything OK?” The answer, I discovered, was that at no point in the evening would the waiting staff make even the slightest attempt to give a damn.

Nicky absented herself for a few moments. Up until now, the waiters might have brought our food immediately on clearing the previous course, but we had at least been sitting at the table. Clearly, a call of nature could not be allowed to interrupt their Olympic sprinting display and so, regardless of her absence, on came the “roasted free-range veal, winter vegetables in a cocotte”.

There was more of the same. On and on it came, relentlessly.

And then to dessert. As if the “sod you, the customer” attitude had not been evident enough, the waiter had demanded that we choose our dessert at the start of the meal. I doubt if you have ever eaten seven full courses in one sitting before, but let me tell you something. You don’t have a clue at the outset what you fancy for dessert.

It turned out to be academic anyway. Nicky’s rum-baba, “Monte-Carlo Style”, consisted of what tasted like stale sponge smothered in cream. My “pear declination, caramel ice-cream, topped with lace biscuits” was almost inedible, the caramel burnt over an assemblage of diced, tasteless pear.

I declined it.

The bill was $890 (£480). (We had also had a cocktail and a glass of champagne each.) We would, quite literally, have had more pleasure standing outside in the blizzard, ripping up $10 bills. We would certainly have been more comfortable. And we would not have had to spend the rest of the evening, as we did, in what Americans call the John.

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From today's Telegraph:

...But it isn't all doom and gloom for the Glaswegian superchef [Gordon Ramsay]. For he's already planning to open two new restaurants: one in Las Vegas, the other in Mayfair.

"I've just come back from Vegas, where I am looking at an interesting site right in the middle of the city," he said at Monday's Tio Pepe ITV London Restaurant Awards. "Here in London, I'm planning a new place in Mayfair for next year. Both projects will be entirely mine: I will do everything, right down to cooking there when they are complete.''

Blimey. I always knew he was a wondrous chef, but I hadn't realised that he had triumphed over the laws of time and space, and could cook dinner in both Las Vegas and Mayfair.

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I don’t expect your sympathy. There are, I concede, more deserving causes than ‘hack forced to eat sub-standard food in tatty restaurant at someone else’s expense’. Trust me on this, though: such suffering is yours at one remove.

The restaurant critic of the Sunday Telegraph, Matthew Norman, recently reviewed Shepherd’s, a restaurant in Westminster. He didn’t just review it; he damned it. “Where do you start with somewhere like Shepherd’s? You don’t. If you have any sense you finish with it.” Referring to his crab and brandy soup, he argued that “were it found today in a canister buried in the Iraqi desert, it would save Tony Blair’s skin”. The restaurant was “the eighth circle of hell”. Last week, the owner of Shepherd’s, Richard Shepherd, responded by threatening to sue the critic for libel, supported by its customers’ paeans of praise.

I wouldn’t want to rain on Mr Norman’s parade, but it is beyond me how anyone with a functioning sense of taste or smell could conceivably enjoy Shepherd’s. The food – food only in the sense that it is something which one puts into one’s mouth – is often disgusting and never, in my experience, better than barely acceptable. The atmosphere is like a public school dormitory for grown ups.

I speak with some authority. For nearly a decade I ate in Shepherd’s at least monthly, often more frequently. No, I am not clinically insane. But when I worked in Westminster, it was pretty much the only restaurant in the area. MPs and ministers would not want to venture far beyond, and so we would end up going to Shepherd’s. Dear reader, I suffered.

Shepherd’s is, of course, far from alone in serving dreadful food at an exorbitant price – two courses at lunch for £24. Pied a Terre, on the other hand - one of the finest restaurants in the country - charges just £21.50. It’s a paradox of which anyone who eats out is aware: pay two pounds fifty more and leave feeling sick; pay two pounds fifty less and eat some of the best food of your life.

It’s a paradox with an explanation, however. And that explanation is one of the oldest maxims around: you can indeed fool most of the people, most of the time. For a while I was a food critic, and the phenomenon which struck me most forcefully was that people really do think that price equals quality. Pay fifty pounds for a meal and it must be good. If you don’t like it – if it seems to you that the fish hasn’t been cooked properly or if the fruit tastes off - then it’s you who’s at fault, not the chef. You clearly don’t appreciate the originality of the kitchen.

I was recently served a rancid piece of cheesecake at a well-regarded restaurant. When I sent it back, not only was there not a word of apology, but initially the waitress implied that I clearly had no idea what cheesecake tasted like. ‘No one else’ – the classic line – ‘has complained’.

I used to cook for money (I hesitate to call myself a chef, since it was minor league stuff – I earned money as a student by cooking dinner parties) and cook almost all my meals at home. I’m not especially good – I just learned early on how to do the basics. So I’m not boasting, merely stating a fact, when I say that much of the food I eat out is no better than my own cooking. Nor should it have to be – the golden rule is to buy as good quality ingredients as you can find, and to do as little to detract from their flavour as you can. That should apply both in one’s own kitchen and in most restaurants. You don’t always want ‘fancy’ food when you eat out – more often than not you just want tasty food, properly cooked. And that really shouldn’t cost the earth. There is a brasserie at the end of my street in Brussels which serves the most delicious steaks, and perfectly acceptable claret, for 15 euros. No one wants to eat Michelin starred food all the time. When I do, I’ll pay for it.

There are two main problems with British restaurants. First, mid-range places tend to have grotesquely over-inflated prices. Even if Shepherd’s food was perfectly well cooked, the nursery-school menu should not cost more than the likes of Pied a Terre.

But worse still are the cheap and certainly not cheerful brigade – the Garfunkels, Pizza Huts and other chains - which seem economical but, since they serve pigswill, are quite as much of a rip-off.

You don’t always get what you pay for. I’ve had – who hasn’t? – dreadful meals in ruinously expensive places, and superb food in the most basic and cheap establishments. Just as you can get succulent, wonderful and cheap fruit in a local market, and bland, expensive rubbish in Harvey Nichols Food Hall, so too with restaurants. What you do get is what most Brits’ refusal to take food seriously allows Shepherd’s and Garfunkels to serve. If they had no customers, they would go bust. It’s that simple.

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