3 Le Louis XV, Monte Carlo

I have fallen the tiniest bit in love with Michel, the mÀitre d'hotel. It has something to do with his even good looks, the straightness of his bearing, his freedom from any of that pomposity one associates with French food, and his enigmatic smile. That it also has something to do with the vongole, crustacÀs, supions et poulpe de roche he has just served me - shellfish, cuttlefish, squid, octopus, lobster and God knows what else, quickly iced and liÀs d'un filet d'huile d'olive d'ici (d'ici, note, from here!) - I do not doubt. Michel, too, has the air of being d'ici. A delicacy you will not find anywhere else. The other person I have fallen the tiniest bit in love with is the chief sommelier, Noel. Unlike Michel, and indeed the rest of the waiters, all of whom are quick and impenetrable, svelte to the point of being undernourished, and move as though in a sphere to which they are attached by an invisible root system, Noel does not strike one as being d'ici. He looks recklessly Austro-Hungarian rather, and could almost, at least in this company, be described as fleshy. That I partly love him for the wine he selects - a ChÀteau Simone Palette, 2000, yellow as the eyes of the devil and just a touch sulphurous in the aftertaste - again I do not doubt.

Between them, Michel and Noel are seeing to it that once they are finished with me I will have lost all recollection of unsatisfied desire. But then they do have three Michelin stars to live up to. As an eater I am not, as a rule, a pursuer of Michelin stars. Indeed in so far as I can be said to have a rule, it is to avoid a star at all costs.

Too many occasions ruined by intrusive waiters demanding that you shut up and listen to them describe what you are about to eat before you eat it, too many orchestrated removals of silver covers - abracadabra, hocus pocus! - revealing dishes which resemble the battle of Austerlitz viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, all charred remains and choking herbage, the remnants of a happier time.

So I began wary of this famous restaurant, diadem in the crown of Alain Ducasse, who, with two three-star Michelin establishments operating simultaneously, can count himself the most decorated cook in all France. Nothing puritanical. I didn't mind the idea of dining in a frescoed, mirrored salon only marginally less grand than the Palace of Versailles, a mere open window away from where the pampered children of the ancien regime fritter away what is left of their families' fortunes on the roulette tables. I like decadence. I like cut glass chandeliers and gilded pilasters and busts of obscure courtesans, once the favourites of equally obscure French generals.

I like a huddle of sweet roses on the table, in the shade of which tiny silver warblers, created by Christofle, 'peck at imaginary crumbs', while trolleys go round laden with rare Armagnacs. I like there being an upholstered stool for madame's handbag. I even like gold cutlery when it's well-balanced. It was the food I was worried about. Would it be alchemised until it didn't look or taste like food at all? Would I be made to suffer it, be lectured on it, be forced to swallow it in the way we were all once forced to swallow cod liver oil, only now it is in the name of bodily satisfaction not moral improvement that we must close our eyes and open our mouths? More to the point, would there be enough of it? There is something the smallest bit preachy about the menu. 'Le rÀle du cuisinier commence,' it announces on the fly leaf, 'where the work of the artisan and of nature stops. It consists of making very good that which is, already, very beautiful.' A sentiment with which I would not dream of disagreeing, though which I am not sure I wish to be reminded of the moment I sit down to eat. Maybe it is the artisan I would rather not have to think about while the junior sommelier pours me champagne selected from an ice urn big enough for two small children to drown in.

It is a question whether my companion enjoys her homard de Bretagne au court-bouillon servi tiÀde, coeur de sucrine, tomate et mozzarella di Bufala nappÀs de sauce coraillÀe crue, basilic en feuilles as much as I enjoy my seafood, but neither one of us is keen to give much of what we've got away to the other. Her lobster is warm, which is reason enough not to shilly-shally with it, and my crustaceans are chilled, which I too do not want to compromise. We are both, anyway, somewhere we have not been before: she lost in a mozzarella amazement, I marvelling at my plate of pond life, outlandish by virtue of how exactly like the sea it tastes, not piquant but sweet with the sweetness of flesh, crunchy and slightly cheesy, wrong to eat somehow, naked, forbidden. For the first time I understand why Deuteronomy warns against the eating of 'whatsoever hath not fins and scales'. And a restaurant can surely do no more than this - than to restore the original shockingness of food.

In his menus, Ducasse makes a thing of the elements - now the sea, now the vegetable garden, now the pasture. So we follow him, aided by Michel to whom I have ceded all authority - he the priest, I the novitiate - into the allotment. I have a feeling this is where Ducasse's heart is. He doesn't say as much in the literature in my possession, but I believe the garden of his culinary imagination is Eden, prior to the apple of adulteration. Not for nothing is the carpet faded roses on a pale green background, a gentleness which makes the surrounding gold less gaudy, as though it is no more than the light of the sun as man first saw it, when he ate as he was fashioned to eat.

Normally the idea of 'vegetables from the morning's market' holds no excitements for me; not vegetable, nor morning, nor market, being a word I associate with pleasure. But I have an onion, a tomato, an aubergine and a courgette on my plate, each perfectly symmetrical, each lidded like a teapot, each stuffed with itself - a concept I find, for some reason, extremely droll - the whole arranged like one of Jasper Johns' flags of America, succulent to the eye, if such a thing is possible, no less than to the tongue. And that's me sold for ever on vegetables, never mind that a little lamb has been mixed into the stuffing as well, doomed to scour the morning markets of the world for an onion as oniony, a tomato as tomatoish, as these.

If the point of food prepared in this way is to convince you that the combined tastes were not conceived out of a desperation to be novel, but belong together in nature, then I am beginning to get it. 'Essential' is Ducasses's own word for his cuisine, and though I would wish all chefs to cook more and talk less, I think I see what he means. Essential as in revealing the essences of.

That there is still to come what we from Manchester call 'a main meal', dinner proper, I had almost forgotten. Not Noel, though, who is suddenly at my shoulder, agitating a Chateau de Pibarnon, 1995, in my glass. Grenache from Bandol, tart in the finish, a little too flinty for my companion, but my teeth appreciate a hint of limestone in a grape. There is something manly and voracious in it somehow, as though one is drinking the rocky underpinning of the planet. And maybe it goes better with my meat - boeuf de Simmental with shallots and stewed chard stems, France, Bavaria and Switzerland coming together, surprisingly, to wickedly rich, mountainous effect. The beef dark and brooding, as I prefer it, burgundy in the centre, blue black at the edges. Whereas my companion's lamb, seized from the PrÀalpes du Sud flock which graze the pastures of the Alpes de Haute-Provence, is obscenely pink, two stumps of nude baby flesh served with pampered young vegetables which make you think more of the nursery than you might wish.

It is more than either of us can eat. And anyway, we both feel we owe the ceremonials of the restaurant our attention too. Everywhere you look there are men with no stomachs bent over trolleys, lifting lids, slicing meat, rolling butter, introducing cheeses. It is an atmosphere of intense concentration, not solemn but punctilious, each person absorbed in his own skills - his note, for there is not a woman in sight - much as you imagine life in a monastery must have been in the days when monasticism was not an enemy of the senses. It helps that there is so much room between the tables, 50 diners in a room which could easily take twice that number.

For the space, too, is the experience. You eat, you drink, you sit back, you watch. While round and round the trolleys go, bearing champagne, dessert wines, brandies, sorbets, cheese. Shaming, to me at least, the cheese. A cheese eater from the moment I was born, I have always turned my nose up at the footling quoits and mini-pyramids of cream the French call cheese. Cheese to me is a two-pound wedge of seriously strong cheddar and to hell with the damage it does to the roof of your mouth. But now, as a dainty waiter in a tightly buttoned black suit puts together for us plates of subtly variegated golds and yellows d'ici, one softness not at all to be confused with another, this one a little runnier than that, even the rinds precise in their aromas, I know it is goodbye to the unrefined cheddars of my past. I will not linger over the desserts, though my companion swears that her fraises des bois, warm as the breath of panthers, are the most wonderful things that have ever passed her lips. What passes her lips when a waiter pushing a trolley of foliage advances on our table seems to me no less wonderful. 'Look,' she says, 'Birnam Wood!' Thereby proving that you should only ever dine with a person who has a degree in English Literature.

What Birnam Wood is doing at our table I have no idea until the waiter wonders whether he can prepare us tea. Rosmarin? Thym? Menthe? Verveine? I plump for menthe, having read somewhere in our menus that it is 'À la fois calmante, stimulante, tonique et mÀme aphrodisiaque'. As for the latter, after two-and-a-half hours of eating and still going strong, I think not. But it is calming and stimulating, yes, to watch the waiter put on a white glove and scissor off my leaves.

So that's no more tea bags to be numbered among my resolutions - along with no more misshapen vegetables, no more brute cheddar, no more not liking the French, no more keeping madame's handbag between my knees, and no more avoiding three Michelin stars. Of what remains - the bruising and mashing of the menthe, the mignardises et chocolats Alain Ducasse (of which the caramels deserve to be mentioned by name), the ChÀteau de Lacquy Armagnac, 1978, selected and served ruefully by Noel (ruefully because he can see there is little more he can do for me at this hour) - the best part is the serving of the marshmallow, a springy snake of pristine whiteness coaxed out of a glass jar with wooden tongs and sliced to the exact length of your desire with golden scissors. Why the ceremony of the marshmallow should linger in the mind as it does, I cannot say. Perhaps it is symbolic of the whole: plain and exquisite, pure and sybaritic, uncomplicated and yet extravagant, all at once.

Never underestimate the power of symbols. As we are about to leave, Michel presents us with a small packet of madeleines, the Proustian cake symbolic of the sweet excruciations of the past. But also symbolic, it seems to me, of our duty to the future. He smiles his enigmatic smile. Take these madeleines away with you and don't forget what you have learned.

Howard Jacobson is the author of the award-winning The Mighty Walzer. To order a copy of his latest book Who's Sorry Now, for £6.99 with free UK p&p, call the Observer book service on 0870 066 7989

Dinner for two £240

Michelin stars 3 World rating 3 Location HÀtel de Paris, Place du Casino, Monaco 98000 (0037 792 16 3 000) How long is the waiting list? Three weeks in advance during high season, in the summer months What the critics said 'He's my hero' (Gordon Ramsay)