The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage, as Oxford does. The savage lives in the Randolph’s dedicated crime museum with cocktails: the (Inspector) Morse Bar. The Alice is named for two women: Alice Liddell, the daughter of the ecclesiastical dean of Christchurch College – the grandest and most unfinished Oxford college – who posed for photographs for Lewis Carroll, became Alice of Wonderland and later invented a ladyship (an act as English as anything that ever happened here).

The first, of course, is more interesting to me, but Liddell was felled by her imago, who is both too big and too small, as women are, and she fell down a rabbit hole, as women do. Alice Liddell was 67 when women were allowed to take degrees at Oxford, and she was dead by the time female quotas were removed in 1957. A woman must fill her days somehow, and being fictionalised as a smocked infant is better than nothing. As a conceit, it works, because you wander through the Randolph’s preening mid-Victorian halls – respectable and insane, Jekyll and Hyde – and tumble into the Alice, which is apt, though I wonder what hungover students make of it, because it is very bright. But I like restaurants that dare to metaphor and I haven’t seen such monied dedication to a dream world with an industrial kitchen since the Batman-themed restaurant in Soho with its tableau of the death of Batman’s parents, which I struggle to forget, as he did.

There are long banquettes in an almost iridescent bubble-gum pink, met with equally dazzling green chairs; vast chandeliers on a sky-blue ceiling filled with paintings of flowers; monumental drawings of Alice and friends on each wall. The floor spells out her name in mosaic, and surrounds it with a laurel crown.

But Oxford can only take so much whimsy. It needs whimsy to deceive itself about its reality, which is power, and so its famous novelists wrote fantasy, even Evelyn Waugh, whose journey from Golders Green to Oxford was no less extraordinary than Lucy’s to Narnia and Frodo’s to Mordor, and I can testify to that. The Alice may be a dream world, but it is also a brasserie: that is Oxford’s realism. Its immediate competitor is not Narnia or Middle-earth (and I mourn this – I would like to see the Alice near the Cair Paravel Starbucks and the Brandywine Pret) but the Ivy on the High.

The menu is as broad as the dream is narrow: something for every-one, including the necrotics in the Morse Bar lining their stomachs before the next murder, and pint. There are hamburgers and gnocchi; fish and chips; a roast chicken; a pork chop; a parmesan tart; a beef tartare; a Cornish plaice. The cocktail menu is braver: there is Down the Rabbit Hole (tequila, peach, lime, passion fruit) and Drink and Shrink (amaretto, ginger ale, lime, Angostura bitters), and also – and I think this is for the Morse addicts – Pool of Tears (prosecco, gin, triple sec, lemon, rhubarb bitters).

Themed restaurants work if the food does, and this is faultless, though not brave; its courage is all on the wall. The Randolph hamburger (‘grilled with aged beef fat’) is good and dogged, with fine mashed potato and a tomato salad; my companion’s pan-fried chalk-stream trout with charred asparagus and grapefruit is likewise fine. It is Saturday evening in term time, and a pleasing chaos rolls through the dining room. Oxford seethes with psychological undercurrents, and Alice knows them all.