The last time I went to the building which houses the new Wolseley restaurant-cafe on London's Piccadilly, I ate lousy Chinese food for which they tried to charge me double. This time I ate a spankingly good cassoulet and watched Nigel Havers and Joan Collins air-kiss each other. London is clearly improving. Naturally, it is the ability of the Wolseley to place Havers and Collins within air-kissing distance of each other that will attract most attention. We like to know where celebrities gather, like so many wildebeest about the water hole.
In truth their presence is no more than testament to the immense skill and professionalism of the team behind the Wolseley. Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, who have been out of London restaurants for a few years under the terms of the sale of their previous wildebeest watering holes, the Ivy and the Caprice, know exactly what they are doing.
It's been a staggering year for big-ticket restaurant openings in the capital. There has been Gordon Ramsay's upmarket cafe Boxwood and Marcus Wareing's make-over of the Savoy Grill. There has been Tom Aikens's grand gastronomic gymnastics and the Australasian fancies of Osia. There have been the misfires of Brian Turner and the new Petrus and, God help us, Shumi. However smart some of these have been, none comes close to the elan of the Wolseley.
The grand, 1920s building was once a Wolseley car showroom and prior to this it was a tiresome rip-off called China House. Now it has been re-invented as a Viennese cafe. What makes the operation stand out is not simply the lunch or dinner menu, but everything else. This is a hotel-style catering business without the bedrooms. So you can come here for a full English breakfast for £9.75, or for toast and muesli for £6.75. You can stop by for an emergency croissant, or for a sandwich at lunchtime, or for full afternoon tea, complete with a torte list rich enough to make a Viennese waltz with pleasure. I went one lunchtime for a salt-beef sandwich on rye, and though it was one for the non-Jews (where's the fat, boys?), it was a pleasure to eat in the small gilded bar at the front.
The main menu, overseen like everything here by Chris Galvin, formerly of Conran restaurants, is fiendishly clever. It looks of a piece but allows for global, or at least continental, eating. So you can do French - escargot, cassoulet, tarte du jour; or British - bubble and squeak, roast beef, Welsh rarebit; or American - eggs Benedict, hamburger, ice cream; or even Jewish - chopped liver or chicken soup, Wiener schnitzel, ooh, every single pudding that's on offer.
The unifying principles are comfort and reliability, rather than culinary brilliance. The garlic butter with my snails was rich and herby. My cassoulet, one of the daily specials at £12.75, came with chunks of duck confit and Toulouse sausage and white beans. My companion's double-cooked cheese souffle was smart and cheesy and his Wiener Holstein - breaded veal schnitzel, with a fried egg, anchovies and capers - was by the book.
There are niggles, of course: the design of the room, which includes a central horseshoe-shaped barrier that contains the ancient air-conditioning system, has already created an area of the restaurant that is for the air-kissing Joans and Nigels of this world and another that is a chilly 'Siberia' with smaller tables. And there's an unpalatable £2 cover charge. I'm sure the rent is humungous but make it up elsewhere, rather than charging us for just sitting down. Still, the virtues outweigh the vices and it's hard to imagine that anything opening over the next 12 months will match the Wolseley for sheer professionalism.
Which is a great cue for a look ahead to what's coming. In 2004 the march of the gastro-pub will be relentless. If your idea of heaven is a pint of bitter, a packet of pork scratchings and a sticky carpet beneath your feet, then enjoy it while you can. Any pub in any halfway middle-class bit of Britain that comes on the market over the next year will be serving up skate wing with brown butter, and chocolate fondant before you can say, 'Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps, please.'
In the capital the story is the continued break-out of ethnic restaurants from the margins. The team behind the Chutney Mary Indian restaurant are to open another in Knightsbridge. Smart modern Japanese Zuma will spawn a baby brother. The Crazy Bear Hotel in Oxfordshire, famed for its Thai food, will open a venture north of Oxford Street and Alan Yau, of Wagamama and Hakkasan fame, will open Yauatcha, his long-awaited dim-sum place. And I wish he'd get on with it, because the dim sum has always been the best thing about Hakkasan.
A brace of French three-star chefs will also launch more casual eateries in the city. Pierre Koffman, of Tante Claire fame, will finally return with a Gascon bistro and the great Parisian chef Joel Rebouchon will bring his high-concept, no-reservation L'Atelier over from Paris. Being a complete greedy-guts fashion victim, I will attempt to eat in all of these places. But I can already tell you that when I want to sit down over a relaxed dinner with friends for the postmortem, it is to the Wolseley I will go. It's just that sort of place.
· The Wolseley, 160 Piccadilly, London W1 (020 7499 6996). Three courses, including wine and service, £100; breakfast around £10; afternoon tea around £15.
