Noble Rot, which is named for a sickness that afflicts grapes, a self-aware name for a restaurant in London, is becoming a chain. Don’t get me wrong. The Rots in Lamb’s Conduit Street and Greek Street (which replaced the Gay Hussar that died in sympathy with the intelligent left) are two of the best restaurants we have. My only complaint is that, like the Plastics in Mean Girls, they know how lovely they are and have their own promotional magazine.

This food has a loving intensity to it, and it is as good as you will find in London

Now they have expanded into Mayfair – but the least horrifying part, which is Shepherd’s Market. This has been ebbing too: the Curzon Mayfair, its local cinema, a listed post-war jewel, is always in danger of closure because its neighbours think they live in suburban Twickenham and want comparable noise levels. You won’t find a shepherd either. I’m now mature enough not to want to pull my top up every time I walk past the Saudi embassy on Curzon Street, but it is still a plutocrat bubble. So Noble Rot is a good idea.

This restaurant is beautiful, which for me means Georgian. I know that almost everyone who had sex in London in the 18th century had syphilis, and many lost their noses, but the Georgian townhouse is the British gift to architecture, no matter what happened in it. Noble Rot has a corner spot, and it is painted blackish with latticed windows. Kitty Fisher’s, the restaurant named for a courtesan who ate a £1,000 note on a piece of bread, is nearby (accountants – look away). I think Kitty would be pleased that people can pay to enter her still.

There are two rooms, one black, one white – like a floor, or a cat. There are red banquettes and artwork of a devil drinking, and Death holding a bottle of wine, asking: ‘If not now, when?’ It’s a good question: both a rabbinical saying – from Hillel, if you care – and the title of a pro-Zionist novel from Primo Levi. Do they know this? Even so, I wonder if the design team are alcoholics. In the evening, these small rooms are filled with a blooming darkness, lit only by small pools of candlelight, though I can still see Death’s etching. I must use my iPhone torch to read the menu, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The staff know this restaurant is exceptional, especially for Mayfair, with its Roman sluts and meatballs (Bacchanalia) and its enslaved tropical fish and sticky chicken (Sexy Fish). They are young, they have good haircuts, and they treat you as a friend. They bring, swiftly, cheese and onion gougère, which is minute and delicious; then roast calf’s liver with champagne, choucroute and mustard, which my companion, no slouch at food, names ‘perfect’; a Herdwick Hogget Barnsley chop with puntarella and anchovy and pommes purées, which is dense and perfectly cooked; then an immense, sugary millefeuille, which Kitty Fisher should have spent her note on.

This food has a loving intensity to it, and it is as good as you will find in London. The Holborn Rot is larger and more expansive – I remember it as if it had straw on the floor, but that can’t be true – and the Soho Rot has all those memories of Michael Foot. This is smoother: it is Mayfair. It was £140 for two, with a glass of wine. This is a superb restaurant, though it does remind me very slightly of the London Dungeon. It’s a truism that few things work in London nowadays. This does.