Restaurants | 4 February 2006

I ask Egon Ronay, the man who first put the rosettes into British cooking and who has just published his 2006 guide to the best restaurants in the UK, if he’d care to have lunch, show me how he judges a restaurant, maybe teach me a thing or two. (As if I needed it! Pull the other one!) He agrees and suggests we try Rules — ‘London’s Oldest Restaurant’ — which is fine by me, as I’ve never known whether it is simply a kind of top-of-the-range Angus Steak House for dimwit tourists of a dim-witted, touristy nature or properly good, genuinely worth going to. He doesn’t know either. He’s had letters about Rules: some good, some not so; maybe it should be in his guide, maybe it shouldn’t. Let’s go.

Rules, which was founded in 1798 and specialises in game, oysters, pies and puddings, is at the back of Covent Garden, and is rather wonderful inside, especially if you are fed up with the sparse, blond-wood decor of most restaurants these days.