I am not sure the vast Bierschenke bierkeller in Covent Garden is successful, even if it is skilful: I worry it is the wrong place for it. People go to Covent Garden to buy gym clothes, watch musical theatre and pick up men, not to find Wagner and pigs and the drumbeat of the earth: Covent Garden is more Kit Kat Club than Twilight of the Gods with sausage. I am not saying you must be into Götterdämmerung to enjoy this restaurant. It just helps.

It used to be in the City of London, and that worked. City men are savages, mining for gold: they would absolutely kill a pig. That is what beer halls are, base: wheat, fat, sweat. But the City site was redeveloped, and a big cellar off Seven Dials on Earlham Street came up – it was the Belgian restaurant Belgo, which always made me think of mayonnaise, and it closed during the pandemic, so it always will – and here it is.

I know two beer halls: that one in Munich, to use Daily Mail insinuation-speak for the location of a putsch, and that one in Munich in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, in which Lanzmann traps an SS officer who looks like Hugo Weaving behind the bar where he is pulling beer and faffing about with glasses. Lanzmann tries to interview him about beer because he won’t talk about the Shoah: who would? Another waiter with kind eyes counsels the genocidal Hugo Weaving impersonator to talk to Lanzmann about beer, because he obviously hates him. This is the only very funny bit in Shoah, and you should watch it. It’s free in Poland for obvious reasons, but you can get it on Amazon Prime.

We are met at the entrance by a young woman in a dirndl. She knows she looks stupid – she has wise eyes. The website promises male waiters in lederhosen, but I don’t see any: perhaps they rebelled. Downstairs it smells new, which is weird – it’s a cave – though it will soon smell of Bavarian draught beer, which according to my companion is the best beer there is: the beer cellar is as pristine as a shrine. My companion says the beer hall looks like every college buttery in Cambridge, but I think it looks like a parking garage for Neolithic man and his most treasured things. It is decorated with Bavarian maple wood tables and benches; there are orange cushions on the walls. It is too dark to read the menu, and that is OK if you are in bed or outer space. There is no atmosphere I can find, and I think this is deliberate: a beer hall is an existential void to fill.

We have a plate of small Nürnberger sausages and sauerkraut and a flammkuchen, which is essentially a German pizza with sour cream, smoked bacon and onion: both are excellent and well-priced. Leberkäse, a beef and pork meatloaf, is less good. I think meatloaf should be as big as your dreams and as wet as your bath, but this one seems to be disguised as a croque monsieur beside an adequate warm potato salad: you don’t process meat to make something less of it. The Haxe comes. It is a huge slow-roasted pork knuckle – how big are these pigs? – served with crackling, sauerkraut, dumpling and gravy: at £24.50, in the age of the indifferent £50 sirloin steak, it’s a bargain, so we order another one. The dirndl woman treats this as normal. Then we eat a Käsekuchen, a cheesecake so delicate I think it is squatting in the wrong native cuisine.

So here is Big Little Bavaria on Thames. It might surf the Brexit wave to success, or not. These are complex times.