The Mount St Restaurant lives above the Audley Public House on Mount Street, ‘a traditional neighbourhood pub, carefully restored, and where history and contemporary art collide’, and which once appeared in a Woody Allen film called Match Point. It is owned by Artfarm, founders of the Hauser and Wirth Gallery, who have created an art gallery above the pub and inserted a restaurant into it.

I have been rude about Hauser and Wirth in the past. Its Somerset gallery featured a recording of a cow mooing in a former cowshed, which was insulting to the cows, but people do terrible things to farms nowadays: perhaps we could pay for Jeremy Clarkson’s screams in his tool shed. Here, though, is real art, and it is for sale: in acknowledgement of this the King came to the opening. There is ‘Primrose Hill’ by Frank Auerbach, the most heartbroken of the late-20th-century artists, but he was a Kindertransport child; an absurdly tiny Picasso which looks like a framed stamp, or just currency; and a pleasing painting of an owl, which reminds me of my husband. There is also Lucian Freud’s ‘Self-Portrait: Reflection’ by the door, doing what Lucian Freud always does, which is pushing his rage into your face until you collapse to it, which I suppose is understandable if you were born a Jew in Berlin in 1922.

You climb a steep staircase, which is more cliff face than staircase. The dining room, which is long and low-lit, has a polished white bar and a fretted mosaic floor: it is very fine, and I think the artist – Rashid Johnson – drew his own face in it, called it ‘Broken Floor’, and invited guests to emote on it, which they would probably do unasked, it being a floor. The salt and pepper cruets are by Paul McCarthy and they look like butt plugs. I am not just saying that: search for them on Google images if you think I am being smutty to plague you.

Above the restaurant there are private dining rooms named for individual countries, as if competing in an exquisite Eurovision Song Contest. The Scottish Room has an antler chandelier, a painting of the Young Pretender and its own tartan: Artfarm also owns the Fife Arms in Braemar, which looks like a shortbread tin in mourning. The Swiss Room looks like a tidied-up Kandinsky, and the Italian Room like a Tuscan block of stone with velvet seats in the shapes of scallops.

We sit under ‘Still Life with White Carbs’ by Keith Tyson, and its monumental naan bread, which makes me wish Tintoretto painted jelly. Since the pandemic prices have soared. The day I ate at Mount St Restaurant I paid £35 for a bad club sandwich at Mister Nice on Davies Street. The prices are no less absurd here but the clientele want to pay them: sirloin steak and chips with béarnaise sauce is £52, though fine. Lobster pie for two is £96, and the lobster peeks from the pastry like stargazy pie but monied and therefore improved, and pigeons in Pimlico with duck liver, bacon and red cabbage is £48. Pudding – dark chocolate mousse for £14.50 and rhubarb and custard soft-serve with ginger shortbread for £12.50 – is glorious.

This is a beautiful and finely made restaurant, even if the flooring is by a madman. My only objection is to its innate contradiction: do people thrilled to spend £500 on dinner have enough sensitivity to understand Auerbach’s broken ‘Primrose Hill’? Here the artist – and only the artist – emotes from the wall. That is what he is paid for, and it has always been so.