9.5/10
Telephone 020-7836 5314. Address 35 Maiden Lane, London WC2. Open All week, noon-11.30pm (10.30pm Sun). Price Three courses with drinks, £45-55 a head.
It is simply impossible, while sitting in the velvety Victorian paradise that is Rules in Maiden Lane, gulping Guinness from a silver tankard, to prevent the spirits being lifted. If anyone on earth could have managed it, that person is your reviewer in the midst of his Christmas shopping, and I couldn't. In fact, after barely five minutes I was cheerily reflecting that this - the oldest surviving restaurant in London, dating back to 1798 - is where Scrooge would have taken the Cratchits to celebrate Tiny Tim's recovery.
Dickens was a regular here once, while a little later a Prince of Wales, fatigued by the wait for his mother's death (Edward VII, as he became, or Bertie as we arch monarchists prefer to call him), apparently used often to give his mistress Lillie Langtry a regal seeing-to in the salon privé upstairs that carries his kingly name.
There have been very few changes in the intervening 100 years, the most notable being the line in the menu that euros are accepted. Yet somehow this place manages the unlikely win double of being at once both a tourist magnet and a superb restaurant in its own right.
The room, shaped after a train carriage, is a riot of plushness, with thick, swirly-patterned carpeting, crimson banquettes and ancient chandeliers, while the rich nicotine walls are absolutely bedecked with humorous prints and oil paintings. It ought to be cloying and claustrophobic, but somehow it is so luxuriant and relaxing that even the curious montage to my left of Christmas baubles and tinsel hanging from antlers beside a Britannia-esque mural of a triumphal, post-Falklands Mrs Thatcher soon came to seem a seasonal enchantment rather than an inducement to physical violence.
"This is bliss," said my friend as he studied the menu - and he was right. Anyone with any taste at all for game or English comfort food of the highest quality, or both, will rejoice (rejoice! that mural does tend to stick in the consciousness) at the sight of "Braised Roe Deer Cobbler" (not quite what it sounds; anyway, we did the Bushtucker Trial stuff last week) nestling alongside "hand raised pie of the day", beef hung for a month, and a variety of such recherché birds as snipe and widgeon.
Sticking to the Guinness (not that the wine list is particularly overpriced), we shared three starters and loved them all. Cornish crab and prawn cocktail couldn't have been fresher and came with soda bread, while buttery potted shrimps were served with Melba toast and mixed English greens. The pick of the trio was a brilliantly simple dish of the kind Bertie might have ordered as his savoury... a collation of wild mushrooms and roasted globe artichokes on crunchy sourdough toast.
In choosing the main courses, we felt there was a moral imperative to order the dishes we did. My friend had the steak and kidney pudding, a big, fat, majestic affair oozing thick, rich gravy beneath a perfect suet crust, and packed with the finest beef and offal. My roast grouse with all the trimmings (bread sauce, bacon, redcurrant jelly and the fried, crushed oat cakes alarmingly known as gravel) was also beyond fault. A previous editor of mine used to order this bird with the memorable instruction, "Stick it in the oven for five minutes, wipe its bum and bring it to the table", but I prefer it a little pink, and it came cooked as requested, tender beyond belief and delicious beyond words. Side dishes were great - not that you can go far wrong with honey-roasted parsnips - as were the puddings, especially a concoction with the Catherine Tate-ish name of Gypsy Tart (are you calling my dessert a pikey?) of evaporated milk, sage, caramelised apple and Walnut Whip-style fondant so unbelievably rich and calorific that it should have been served with an angioplasty as well as the cream.
"My God, that was some meal," said my friend, belching contentedly as we waddled back into the 21st century, strangely tempted to hail a hansom cab and safe in the knowledge that lunch at Rules had immunised us against the abundant horror of Christmas for at least as long as it took for the shopping to resume.
