My oven is on the fritz so, obviously, I have been out house-hunting this week. You see, I’ve got this stinky old Zanussi electric oven and hob which has been in my house since I moved in five years ago, and was 15 years old then. For the most part it has fitted in well with my primitive style of cooking, although it is quite irritating having a range that decides for itself when things want a slow simmer and when they want a rolling boil and does not stoop to include you in the decision-making.

Mostly I just roast chickens. No frills. I put one in the oven, shut the kitchen door, go upstairs to work, shut the study door, and forget all about it. By the time I can smell food, up four flights of stairs and through two doors, the chicken is ready. This technique, finely tuned as it is, does not work for everything. With boiled eggs for example, the smell of food through two doors and up four flights of stairs means that the bottom two floors are on fire and it’s time to jump out of the window.

But the maximum temperature my oven can reach is now down to not much more than 110C, and the other day it took me four hours to roast a chicken. After which it was pretty dry, and still quite red in the middle. So when I came out of hospital I decided to get a new oven. Only this time, starting from scratch, I would obviously be getting a gas hob. But for that I would need to plumb gas into the kitchen. To do that will mean taking up floorboards and removing the built-in bit with the low-level fridge and freezer I have never used. So it would really be a good time to finally redo this terrible kitchen altogether.

But the thing is, when I do the kitchen I really ought to extend it into the side-return to make it a more comfortable size and create an eating area, so that I can get the dining table out of the telly room. But that’ll cost fifty thousand quid, take six months, make my house unliveable in, and depress the hell out of me.

So I might as well move to a place where the kitchen is already done. I’ve looked at three or four. All of them a little bit bigger than my place and with an extra floor, but all of them with the kitchen on the lower-ground, which is to say, in the basement. Why? Who on earth wants to cook and eat underground? We only just came out of the caves. I’d feel like I was eating in Hitler’s bunker in the last days of the Reich (“Pass me another slice of Goebbels, Herr Kommandant…”) and I really don’t have the energy to start rebuilding houses, so I guess I’m staying here, ovenless, and, I dunno, eating boiled food.

Or going out, which is what I decided to do for lunch the other day. Thought I’d go to Saki, which opened on West Smithfield (that hotbed of modern foodism) a couple of years ago and which has been getting good reviews ever since for its modern-but-not-too-modern Japanese food. Walking up from Farringdon Tube, I found it just along from Club Gascon and its satellites, and looking pretty bright and breezy, shelves full of Japanese things, sunlight streaming in and, wait – what’s this? – we’re being shown downstairs, down more stairs to the basement, nooooooooo!

Silly me, I’d forgotten. The Japanese are crazy for basements. They won’t eat anywhere else. In Tokyo the basement of every department store is a depachika, a sort of überfood emporium to make Fortnum & Mason weep (although, to be honest, these days Tesco Metro could make Fortnum & Mason weep), and the most upscale restaurants of all are ancient kaiseki joints hundreds of feet below the skycrapers, with artificial rivers and orchards, open to members only and staffed by traditional geisha of the kind not seen above ground since before the War.

Presumably this love of cellar dining originally had something to do with earthquake neuroses, but basements have now become so inextricably linked to restauration that in 2008 if you show a Japanese any hole in the ground he will start to salivate. If a Japanese restaurateur were to buy the Ivy I feel certain he would sink his dining room 50ft into the bowels of Theatreland and tarmac over the current ground-level eating area for a car park. Indeed, the first Japanese to see plans for the Channel tunnel at first assumed the excavation was for a massive sushi bar.

So there we were in the basement, all red and black with a big central sushi table and the low thrum of nondescript dance music turned down to minicab level (just too quiet for the tune to be identified and enjoyed, but just loud enough to be an irritation, like a tune on the radio in a builder’s van parked in the next street), so very urban Japanese indeed. And full of fat men in suits. And quite stuffy, so that I, even though I wasn’t in a suit, soon wore the fine sebum sheen so fetchingly sported by my fellow lunchers.

I suppressed the urge to bolt because the random flopsy with whom I was lunching seemed perfectly happy. No, wait. She wasn’t a random flopsy. She specifically said she didn’t want to be called that. She was a very specific flopsy, the editorial flopsy who guards the telephonic portals of The Times Magazine – phone for me, and you get her, and a far more charming earful – and, as such, she is of a flopsical genre absolutely safe from my leery clutches. The Magazine editorial assistant is sacrosanct. Never in my life have I so much as… well, OK, once. OK, twice.

Anyway, the food was really very good. Toro at £21.50 for five pieces delivered your money’s worth (sweet as honey and absolutely free of fibres), likewise the hiramasa yellowtail, salmon roe, mackerel and scallop. These last two benefited from being super-fresh, so that the mackerel had not a molecule of the metallic tang it takes up on the turn, and the scallop had the sweetness of grapes. Alexia, the not-flopsy, had not had toro, scallop or mackerel raw before, and was delighted.

Nor had she had eel, and didn’t plan to, even slipping a no-eel clause into her e-mail agreement to lunch with me. But I slipped her a little anyway, concealed in a perfectly balanced inside-out roll in which the eely oils mixed with those of some squished avocado and brought out each other’s nuttiness. Other rolls, of spicy tuna and soft-shell crab, were very well done, but it was in the deep-frying department that this joint came alive.

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