54 St Martin's Lane, London WC2 (020 7836 2645)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £90

I like language. I think it's a brilliant way of communicating stuff. Equally I get cross when it's used clumsily. The latest bit of food and drink language-torture to get me all peevish is "natural wine". The term is used to describe wines made without additives, often but not restricted to sulphur, which has been employed since the 15th century to control fermentation and stabilise the product. What a steaming pile of shameless old cobblers.

For a start there is the idea of "naturalness". A quick bit of undergraduate philosophy: if the human race is a natural phenomenon, then anything we do is natural, just as it's natural for ants to make ant hills and rabbits to dig holes. It doesn't mean everything we do is fine. But it does mean that calling one thing we do natural and something else unnatural is to take the English language, jump all over it, drive a stake through its heart, cover it in butane, drop a match on it and laugh at the guttering flames.

But here's what matters. Every natural wine I have ever tried has been horrible. It's felt like punishment; a sweet promise broken. If that's what additive-free wine is like – the whacking smell of a pigsty before it's been cleaned down, an acrid, grim burst of acid that makes you want to cry – then bring on the chemicals. Hurrah for sulphur. Hurrah for humankind and its ability to use all the tools at its disposal to make nice things to drink.

I mention this because some of the early online mutterings about the Green Man and French Horn, a new restaurant in an old pub from the admirable team behind Terroirs and Brawn, suggested they might go big on natural wines. This made sense. The main investor in this restaurant group is the wine company Les Caves de Pyrène which numbers natural wine fetishists among its experts.

The good news, after that rant, is that the list is much more mixed than I was led to believe. It has a great choice by the glass, lots of interesting things under £30 a bottle and is dispensed by people who actually know what they're serving.

This new venture, with its bare brick walls and banquettes, in a cosy, narrow space on London's St Martin's Lane, draws its inspiration from the wines of the Loire and the way they partner funky things from the sea so well. There is a rustling bowl of crisp, salty whitebait for £7.50, which we started eating primly with our forks until any pretence at politeness was abandoned and they became finger food. As did a generous serving of surf clams in a bright broth of fennel and dill. There were three grilled sardines and, though slightly underdone, the flesh came away perfectly from the fiddly bones.

From elsewhere on the menu a thick sweetcorn soup with crunchy bits of bacon and chopped spring onions was exactly the sort of thing you need when autumn has suddenly moved on to nodding terms with winter. A plate of fried eggs, squelchy sautéed chicken livers and artichokes is a fry-up for people who like their fat and protein with a big Gallic shrug.

Best of all: glorious cèpes en persillade. According to the song the best things in life are free. This is not true. The best things in life cost £12 for a plate of caramelised, meaty wild mushrooms, under a stinky pile of butter-fried garlic and parsley. Eat them with a close friend. We finished with a crisp-based tarte vigneron, the thin slices of apple first braised in red wine, and a soft poached pear filled with a little cream, on a salted butter caramel sauce with a crisp sable biscuit.

The brilliance here is the ability to expand the Terroirs idea – small and big plates of rich gutsy food matched to interesting wines at a fair price – in different locations, without losing a sense of individual identity. It works and it keeps working. They are welcome to open as many of these as they like.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place