It was a gift from the god of metaphors. When we arrived at Granita, the Islington restaurant where, in 1994, Gordon Brown agreed to step aside to allow his friend Tony Blair to become leader of the Labour party, the frontage was encased in scaffolding.
It was as if the entire edifice needed shoring up. OK, so maybe all they were doing was repointing the joint. But at the end of a conference week during which the party of government has been fighting furiously to re-assert its position and stem the haemorrhage of support, the temptation to sniff out parallels between them and the restaurant that came to define so completely the New Labour project, is irresistible.
So, the first thing that should be said is that, unlike the Government, lots of people still seem to like Granita. On a wet Tuesday night, I and my companion, the political commentator Jonathan Freedland, who has done his share of Brown and Blair watching, found a pared-down dining room boasting very few free tables. There was a fine clatter and buzz about the place.
If New Labour was a restaurant, I wondered out loud as we awaited our starters, what kind of restaurant would it be? Blair would be the Matre d', Jonathan said, and Brown would be the chef. And by now they would be arguing furiously over just how rich to make the sauces.
The place would have made its name by reinventing working-class classics, so instead of serving pie and mash with parsley sauce it would have come with a salsa verde. The bangers in bangers and mash would have been merguez. The fish in fish and chips, red mullet.
In other words, hip and modern enough to attract the luxury crowd without entirely alienating the traditional British restaurant goer. At first, it would have been a raging success, a broad church with wide appeal. But now, as suspicions had grown that the cooking had become too fancy, too ignorant of contemporary tastes, bookings were drying up.
As you can see, Jonathan and I could have kept this game going for hours, which was useful because, like the Labour government, Granita proved a little slow to deliver. We nibbled on fennel-seed bread and sipped our unoaked Australian Chardonnay and studied the other punters: youngish, hip-ish, moneyed-ish. In other words, the very people who voted the Government in.
The food, when it did arrive, may not have been exactly as described above, but it was of a similar vintage to New Labour. Which is to say, very mid-90s: lots of fusion cooking with a few classics thrown in for ballast. It's the stuff we have come to call Modern British or Modern European, simply because we're eating it here and we're eating it now.
My mussels, for example, came with a lemon grass and coconut-milk liquor, rather than the traditional white wine and cream. The mussels themselves were fine, large, juicy specimens, but the sauce was just a little too sharp and citrus for my liking. Jonathan had a sorrel and onion tart - an unreconstructed quiche by any other name - which he declared a little too light. This, I told him, was an entirely eccentric complaint. Lightness is usually a virtue - though not, it seems, to a man of politics. Jonathan, it appears, is the kind of man to rate content over form every time.
Our main courses were a similar mixed bag. Jonathan's grilled seabass - a very 'then' fish - came crisp-skinned and tender. My chargrilled chicken with spinach and pine nuts was less successful, partly because of an overload of cumin and partly because of a ladelful of an over-salty sauce which had taken the crisp bite out of the rendered skin. You will doubtless think I am obsessed by the New Labour metaphor thing, but it really did feel like the chef was trying too hard to get our attention; that he was concentrating too much on how the dish sounded when described, rather than tasted when eaten.
The puddings - the sweeteners, if you like - were a raging success. My chocolate marquis was a stunningly intense slab of chocolate mousse beneath a thick overcoat of cream. I ate it with gusto. It is, after all, the new millennium, and we no longer need to be embarrassed about our puddings being rich. It is our right. Jonathan also liked his mocha trifle, the sweetness of the chocolate cut through by the bitter taste of coffee. Nevertheless, it defeated him.
And then came the bill and once more the metaphors kicked in. Because, while individually none of it had looked too costly - £5.95 for starters, £13.50 for main courses, £16.95 for the wine - at the end it all added up to a whacking £80. The chef may argue that the choice is ours: that if we want good services they cost - and he will have a point. But that doesn't stop it hurting.
As we left, our eager (and slightly earnest) waitress noticed the discarded trifle. She wanted to know if there was a problem. 'The chef is kind of temperamental,' she said. 'He'll want to know if it was too sweet or too much. He'll need to know.' Jonathan nodded. 'The chef isn't Gordon Brown,' he said. 'It's John Prescott.'
• Granita, 127 Upper Street, London N1 (020 7226 3222). Dinner for two, including wine and service, £80. Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
