Another day, another revolution in the way we bring you your Saturday morning restaurant review. I have often reviewed two restaurants in the same piece, sometimes I have written up as many as five. Occasionally, such as when I reviewed a lone pork pie bought in a Norfolk museum shop, I review no restaurants at all. But never before have I reviewed the same place, in the same piece, twice. Never, until now.

As I write, I am between visits to the Connaught. I went a few days ago, and I am going tomorrow. When I went a few days ago, I went with a gently throbbing heart. Hélène Darroze, the darling of southwest France, the toast of Paris, the most fêted female chef in France, was newly installed in the kitchen, her name was above the door, and we were told to brace ourselves for the bravest gastronomic dawn since Ronald McDonald arrived in Woolwich in 1974.

And I had a lunch so embarrassingly clunky in every way that the only humane thing to do was to take it outside, step on its neck and put a bullet through its ear. Then head off to Woolwich for a Big Mac.

I came home, I sat down to write. The phone rang. It was A.A. Gill, my counterpart on our sister paper (our bigger, fatter but nonetheless apparently very popular sister), The Sunday Times. We nattered of this and that, and of the Connaught. Wasn’t the cooking, he said, just exquisite?

“Er, um, oh, well, you see, Adrian, I thought, rather, er, not.”

I hate these moments. I simply haven’t got the courage of my convictions. I’m a fan of Gill’s. He’s quite often right about restaurants, he’s by far the most entertaining of the older generation of critics, and was no doubt cracking wise across the best table at the Connaught back when the only dinner conversation I knew was my nanny saying, “Open wide.” If he says the cooking rocks, it probably does. So we’re going back, together. For a double check.

Personally, I’m not looking forward to it. The place is just monstrous in every respect. A parade of slapstick comedy paradoxes. A ludicrous clashing of epochs, a laughable collision of cultures, an horrific clattering of flavours on a plate. A deafening symphony of horror.

How can one’s bill for lunch at the grand old Connaught – a computerised ticket that tots up to £237.37 for two people having three courses and one glass of wine each – arrive in a little fold of paper with “your lunch today: £237.37 Thank you!” handwritten on it in felt tip?

How? How? It’s like a bill at Giraffe or Pizza Express, where some poor Slovakian kid is angling for a cash tip from a table of weary mums. It’s like a bill made by a six-year-old playing “restaurant”. I’d have thought the Connaught’s footmen would stop sentences wearing exclamation marks at the front door and send them home to dress properly.

And how can a place that pays lip service to world water management by offering Belu as its bottled water change my totally unmarked napkin eight (EIGHT) times? That’s practically a full machine load just on my spotless napkins.

And how can two dark-suited, fat-bellied, rosy-cheeked, grey-haired, late-sixties captains of industry be presented, as they finish their coffee, with a wee little folded grey vellum handbag full of choccies to take away? The poor men just looked at their gifts, then at each other, then got up and left (when I had so wanted to see what they looked like with the little pwezzies in their big pink fists).

How can you serve “porc noir basque de la vallee des aldudes” with huge chunks of pineapple (or “dice” as the waiter idiotically called them, poking his big, hairy finger at them, and at everything else on the dish until I thought he was actually going to pick up a bit of meat and show me what it looked like underneath). Pineapple? This isn’t Pizza Hut. The clash with the pork was horrific, and in no way helped by a treacly reduction that had all the clag and yack of WD-40.

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