Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has always been here. Other restaurants fall so swiftly you have only fragments of impressions. Breakfast on Bond Street in what feels like a one-bedroom flat belonging to Patrick Bateman. Pasta in a cellar with art, and they only care about the art. Salad at an Aslan-style stone table without mice. Nudity and berries.

It was opened by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, the best restaurateurs of the age, in the old Wolseley building at 160 Piccadilly, between Caviar House and the Ritz hotel. Wolseley is a forgotten brand of motorcar, and this was its preening showroom. Nothing beside remains, but hubris is my favourite sin.

Corbin and King lost the Wolseley after the pandemic, and I deprived it of my custom for a while. But I passed it often, peeked in at the still-functioning interior, and eventually I went back, like a character in one of those irritating novels about memory to be found in the windows of bookshops, specifically in Hampstead.

The original Wolseley was a joy-maker. It was so good it spawned a slew of bad impersonators that cover Britain even now. It is the reason why your bum is welded to a banquette and tables have tiny lamps, like in the Kit Kat Club but oblivious to what that really means. It is also – and no one will thank me for reminding them – why Café Rouge shrivelled up.

It was a marvellous pastiche of a European grand café but better. I have been to La Coupole in Paris. It is every shade of brown, is less conscious of its past than strangled by it, and the food is only adequate. It was instantly famous and expressed – do not glower at me, you benefited – the Europhile confidence of the Blair years. The staff were charming, the attention to detail was fanatical – no one had better tableware – and, best of all, it didn’t exist for a social elite. This was an obsession of Corbin and King: they wanted everyone to come to their restaurants because they understand that, in restaurants and in life, a cabal is necrotic. In the Cameron years they tried to ignore an ever-calcifying class system, and they succeeded as well as is possible. There was Lucian Freud next to someone who had escaped a Beefeater restaurant by inches. It isn’t my favourite Corbin and King restaurant – that is Brasserie Zédel, which behaves like the cave of a sorceress who is into onion soup and pinks, and in which I see myself – but it is the grandest and the best-sited, a stone cake among stone cakes on the road to Hammersmith, selling the food that children like: a bacon roll, a hamburger, a banana split.

It is as lovely inside as I remember: black and white, like film noir but in tiling, and wondrously lit. It’s late and it is raining monstrously in the street outside. It’s not busy. All-day grand cafés deal in tides: this one is ebbing. The staff are flushed. The lights are pools. I don’t know what I expected – a portal to Café Rouge or the berry restaurant or some evil combination of both? – but the Wolseley still feels thrilling, and I name that not an insult to its founders, but a tribute. It’s beautiful and easy – the staff are more interested than craven – but it is more expensive than I remember: Wiener schnitzel is £20; steak is £39.75; the fish of the day £31.

All are perfect, but it is monied now. Maybe it is Putin’s war, maybe not, but, vapid Blairite that I am, the only thing that’s missing is the thing I loved best.