This week, yet again, I have a really wonderful restaurant for you. I’m sorry this keeps happening. You must think I’m going soft. I haven’t hammered a place in ages, and I know how you love a hammering. All the surveys say so. It’s why the “my-starter-tasted-like-poo-in-a-sock” school of restaurant criticism is so much to the fore these days. Not because restaurants are any worse than they used to be (au contraire), but because grotesquely negative reviews seem to be what people enjoy most.

“The omelette tasted of dog biscuits and old gramophone,” we write, meaninglessly, and you fall about. “The soup was browner than a Frenchman’s mother and twice as slimy; the waiter was so rude you could have bottled his breath and called it Fergus; I wouldn’t eat here if it was the last pub in Oslo and my horse was on fire…”

Ha, ha, ha.

But, really, why? What’s the point? I always feel sorry for bad restaurants. I skulk out quietly, hoping they didn’t recognise me, shed a lonely tear and wait to hear that they’ve closed. I very rarely write about them. After all, what use to you is news of a bad new restaurant? Missionaries rafting down the Zambezi risked their lives to tell the heathen the good news about Jesus Christ, not to make jokes about how rubbish some of the other religions were.

But looking back on the past few months I realise I’ve been loving everything too much. I haven’t given you a poo-in-a-sock moment all year, I don’t think. I’m lagging badly behind the fashion. So I thought I’d best sharpen my pen, dust off my Dictionary of Hilarious Faecal Similes, and dig out a stinker. And what could possibly stink worse, I thought, than La Petite Maison?

It is owned by the same people as Roka, where I had such a vile evening when it first opened that I have never fully recovered. And its press guff boasts that it is a facsimile of a joint in Nice “favoured by Bono, Elton John, Liz Hurley and Rod Stewart”, four people whose presence in any dining room would be as stern a warning to stay away as the presence of Bernard Matthews in the kitchen.

And also, Nice? I go to Nice a lot, and have been doing so for 20 years, and I have never eaten especially well there. I don’t see how bringing those greasy pizzas, pebble-side clip joints and miserable bastard waiters to Mayfair is going to help.

So I swaggered through the double doors with my hands hovering over my guns, as mean and full of justice as Wyatt Earp rolling into Dodge. And was sorely, sorely disappointed.

The room is light and lovely, creamy-walled, starch-bright linen tabled, big-windowed (bringing light and air and sometimes a little traffic and digger noise from the busy courtyard), laid-back, classic, classy, cool, with, oddly, two tomatoes and a lemon on each table, and beautiful rustic baguette chunks lobbed plateless on to the cotton. It feels all light and breezy and relaxed and southern French, in the way that the South of France actually isn’t, but restaurants inspired by it always are.

If there’s a bummer here (and I’ve had to try hard to find one), it’s that a waiter comes over and asks if you’ve been here before (unlikely in my case, the joint having been open only four working days) and then insists on explaining the menu. What he explains, of course, is that it’s a sort of “French tapas”.

It’s always “tapas” these days. Except that this is not what tapas is at all. This is a list of 20 starters of normal size – the type of which, historically, one has always ordered one each – which you are told “you can share”. This is hardly news. You were always allowed to share. Some of us did, some of us didn’t. Being made to share is something quite different. It’s actually less informal and relaxed than the old way, not more. And it always ends up more expensive.

Another faintly annoying thing was this: the salad niçoise is not called “salade niçoise” on the menu, it is called “salade de Nice”. But when I ordered the “salade de Nice”, the waiter said, “Hn?” as French people always do to English people they suspect of imbecility. So I said it again. And again he said, “Hn?” So I pointed to it on the menu, and he said, “Oh, salad niçoise.” Quite irritating, being tricked into appearing an idiot.

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