Rating: 8/10

Telephone 020-7734 4756. Address 11-15 Swallow Street, London W1. Open Oyster Bar, daily, noon-midnight; Grill, Mon-Sat, 12-2.30pm, 6-11pm; Sun, 6-10.30pm. Price Around £120 for two including service and wine. Wheelchair access and disabled WC.

Without wishing to go too far down the road of the annual Face of Jesus Discovered Inside Avocado story that emerges every few months from Mexico City, it's a plain fact that certain foods remind us of people we love.

Myself, I cannot think of an oyster without remembering my mother's mother, a hypochondriac of such astonishing range and inventiveness as to make the rest of us seem recklessly stoical. With the sole exceptions of a Silk Cut, a square of Cadbury's Dairy Milk or any form of placebo, anything offered to her would be declined with a moroseness carefully weighted to entice a follow up. "Do you not like lamb/sherry/ cheddar/broccoli/apple?" you'd mutter mechanically. "Oh no, pet, I like it," flashed the response. "The trouble is, it doesn't like me."

Given that the bewildering array of culinary foes would have rendered her a Breatharian (and breathing had been a struggle since a bout of imaginary pleurisy in 1923), we tended to take this catchphrase with a large pinch of salt (not that she could, of course - what, with her blood pressure?). However, in the case of me and the oyster it is the literal truth. I love everything about them - the ritual with the chopped onion and Tabasco, the wiggly slide down the throat, the saltwater aftertaste, the gulp of Guinness that removes it - but ever since a dodgy one many years ago they have loathed me with such psychotic intensity that all attempts to rebuild the relationship have swiftly ended with a purging of the innards.

So a trip to Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill, in the aptly named Swallow Street, had to be a bath-with-your-socks-on experience. All the buzz and jollity here is in the oyster bar downstairs, but to sit watching others gulp down the little bleeders was unthinkable. So we went upstairs to the grill, newly restored by Richard Corrigan, celebrated chef at Soho's Lindsay House, to a stately Edwardian veneer (beige wallpaper, monochromatic prints of piscine life forms, waiters in tails ... elegant enough, if a touch clinical for my vulgarian tastes).

Mr Corrigan isn't cooking here, but he has put together a menu that is both appealing and faintly irritating. The balance between fish and meat dishes seems about right, and the use of foreign influences (Thai crab soup, for instance, of which more below) is clever rather than faddish. However, the flaunting of provenance always gets on my top ones (who really needs to know that it's "Frank Hederman's smoked salmon"?), as does the shock appearance, in deep midwinter, of "autumn vegetables" in a salad.

This aside, and passing quickly over the view of a building site, we were impressed with most of the cooking. That Thai crab soup (£5.75) was aromatic and creamy, laden with white crab meat and mussels, subtly infused with lemon grass and delivering a gutsy chilli kick. A generous slab of predictably delicious foie gras (£15) was served with apple and lime.

The one howler came, inexplicably, with the rump of beef (£17.50), served with dangerously obese chips and a good sauce Béarnaise. Although listed as coming from west Cork, this was so wildly oversalted that it might have been rescued from a Dead Sea shipwreck.

Both fish dishes, however, were outstanding. My friend was still raving about his chunky, hyperfresh monkfish with cep duxelles, wrapped in light pastry (£18), long after the coffee had been served. My Dover sole (£23) was also faultless, plump and served neatly trimmed and semi-boned with a few capers and grapefruit segments lending enough tartness to offset the buttery splendour of the meunière coating.

A shared pudding of chocolate and chestnut with a rum and mascarpone sabayon was delectable, the wine list offers a decent selection by the glass, and the service is prompt and friendly. Corrigan, himself a chef here a dozen years ago, has done a fine job reviving this fusty old relic, and if the upstairs grill seems sedate, that's doubtless intentional. All the noise and merriment is concentrated in the marbly, wood-panelled room below, and anyone whose affection for the mollusc is reciprocated is directed to the oyster bar downstairs.