The BBC made a very odd documentary about the renovation of Claridge’s: The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild. They filmed, agog, as the hotel grew eight new storeys – three above, and five below – between 2014 and 2021 while staying open: guests slept and ate, unaware of ‘Narnia doors’ to the building site. (That Narnia is where guests aren’t indicates what Claridge’s employees cannot put into words without spontaneously combusting.) Labourers dug the basement by hand and impersonated the Artful Dodger when management toured. The BBC described the new penthouse at length without mentioning that it is gross, with a grand piano in a glass box on a terrace like a Richard Clayderman-themed nightmare. A roof was assembled off-site and stuck on as for a doll’s house. The spa, which offers a facial treatment where the guest must wear a Darth Vader-style mask, flooded in a rainstorm.

But amid the abyss, something has bloomed: something always does. Claridge’s has a perfect restaurant again: the kind which deserves its own Edwardian tribute fiction. I haven’t eaten here since the self-conscious Fera and its ridiculous faux-rustic tableware: if you can afford these prices, there is no need to impersonate a hobbit so you can live with yourself. I am tired of restaurant in search of pumpkin patch. I wasn’t tempted by its successor either, which was run by the equally self-conscious Daniel Humm, who serves tiny ‘immigrant-inspired’ plates at Eleven Madison Park in New York City. He left when management wouldn’t let him go vegan – he has inflicted vegan on his New York City customers because he can’t steal their private aircraft – and so now we have this.

It indicates its lack of pretension with its name, which is Claridge’s Restaurant. The plainness is soothing, because truth – even truth as small as this – is soothing, particularly in Mayfair. It is a beautiful room and it is opposite, I remind you, the loveliest ladies’ loos in London. They are art deco and faintly shabby: when I stare into the looking-glass, I imagine I see Judy Garland and Princess Margaret staring back. Anything that stands against the Dubai aesthetic must be encouraged.

The room is tall, wide and pale: a room for dining, not for assuming a tinny identity, or speaking your rage in bad homeware. It is a British-style brasserie, which means that it thinks of the diner, not the chef and his relationship with his father: you are not at the mercy of a seething subconscious. I am told that Jeremy King, late of the Wolseley and the most gifted restaurateur of the age, is advising, and I sensed it in the welcome: like all superb restaurants, from snack shack to this, it treats the diner like an unwell baby. Good restaurants are, at heart, hospitals for people who are not ill.

The food is perfect and, for what it is, well priced. We pay £100 a head and gorge ourselves. We eat a glorious tomato salad, plated with obsession; a chicken with lemon stuffing; mashed carrot; mashed potato; a steak au poivre; Sussex strawberries; a dish of mushrooms I will remember always; a dish of English cheese and plum jam. It takes great skill to cook this simply. As a literary critic said of Biggles Defies the Swastika: five stars. No notes.

My favourite story about Claridge’s is that Dwight Eisenhower was stationed here in wartime. He hated it and fled for Teddington, then war. I wonder if he would have stayed for this.