98 Micklegate, York YO1 6JX (01904 634 849). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £110

Let’s dispense with the preamble. Here’s what you need to know. You can get from London to York by train in 1 hour and 51 minutes. From Edinburgh, it’s 2 hours 24 minutes. From Birmingham, it’s 2 hours 9 minutes, from Liverpool 1 hour 54 minutes and from Manchester, a mere 1 hour and 14 minutes. All of these (and more) are entirely reasonable journey times to experience Neil Bentinck’s clever, delicious and often brilliant cooking at a price that won’t leave you feeling like you’ve been a willing accomplice in your own mugging.

If among those travellers were a few chefs wanting to learn a thing or two, that wouldn’t be bad either. Because right now Skosh – taken from the Japanese sukoshi for “a little” or “small amount” – is, I think, the ideal of what an ambitious, independent restaurant should be.

Bentinck, formerly the head chef of Van Zeller in Harrogate, is a modern British cook who also manages to riff on the flavours of Japan and the Middle East without confusing either himself, or us. Across a series of small to medium-sized plates, priced from a £3 to the low teens, he displays an uncommon wit and a distinct appetite to feed that leaves you giggling at the emptied porcelain while mourning the passing of its contents.

There’s also none of the cobblers of dishes being sent out in an order the kitchen chooses; our waiter looked at what we’d selected and suggested an entirely logical way in which to deliver them. The dining room has an open kitchen with a chrome counter. It has bare wood tables. It has cutlery and chairs. The nearest Skosh has to anything showy is some chunky, Asiatic-style crockery in muted tones. It’s as if they think the food speaks for itself without any need for gimmickry. I can’t see that catching on.

There is sourdough, with a dark crust and springy crumb, served with the sort of butter you see in children’s picture books. It’s a deep yellow, and comes under a “gunpowder crumb” rich in toasted cumin. A ceramic egg arrives. It is filled with frothy whites whipped up with cream and flavoured with the boisterous lactic tang of Dale End cheddar. A little further down in the depths are pieces of toasted Dale End, like the bits that drop off cheese on toast and sear on the pan beneath. There is the just-set yolk, then beneath that a mushroom duxelle cooked down in a sweet sherry. It is half a dozen teaspoons of joy.

A salt cod mousse, fired from a nitrous gun to produce a thick dollop somewhere between a cream and foam, is sprinkled with togarashi spice, a Japanese pepper. It’s served with giant golden crisps, each one a vertical slice through the whole potato. I find myself marvelling at the attention to detail required to get each of these to stay in one piece. We scoop away, happily. Square croquettes of perfect, deep-fried pig’s head are served with a rhubarb ketchup the colour of sweeties, but given a grown-up savoury edge courtesy of cinnamon and other spices. Extremely moist pieces of deep-fried chicken come with a cloud of hollandaise made with the nutty kick of brown butter. All of these cost between £3 and £6.

By this point a quiet calm has settled over our table. It’s that delight which comes from knowing you are in safe hands; that whatever is delivered here will almost certainly be worth the time and money we are investing in it. And sweet delight is not a euphemism for being sloshed. We do not drink, although there is a short and very civilised wine list, offering everything by the glass, carafe and bottle with nothing beyond the mid-30s. There’s also their leather-bound wine “journal”, with handwritten notes on half a dozen wines at £50 to £60 a bottle for those who want to splash out.

From the Middle Eastern side of the menu comes a piece of lamb belly, long cooked to crisp. It is the colour of mahogany. The fat crunches. The oils and juices release. It is everything you want roasted meat to be. There is a slab of hispi cabbage, charred on the grill, and a ring of yogurt punched up with the citrus kick of sumac, then dressed with strands of lightly pickled onion and pomegranate seeds. There is salt and sweet and acidity.

Most extraordinary of all is a dish of mackerel and eel, skewered separately, then barbecued with a sweet savoury soy glaze until the meat is just firm and the skin crisp. Alongside is a thick, foamy cream flavoured with the iodine and brine of oyster. That in turn is piled with shaved and pickled kohlrabi and finished with the peppery hit of nasturtium flowers. I am willing to declare it one of the best dishes of the year, and I’m eating it in February. I’ll even forgive the whimsy of the word “SKOSH” being cut into more kohlrabi.

The kitchen is not infallible. A dish of gnocchi made with celery root, around a plank of undercooked eryngii mushroom and dressed with miso and hazelnuts, is one of those ideas which reads better than it eats. No matter. As well as desserts, they have a savoury list. It includes a crisp buttery toastie – you can see the ridges from the Breville – made with the extremely boisterous Baron Bigod cheese, all sourness and salt and pungency, with sweet cubes of pickled turnip, on a thick puddle of a truffle mayonnaise covered with shavings of summer truffle. It is nothing short of outrageous. At the meal’s end I tell Bentinck he should sit in the corner and have a long, hard think about what he’s done. “I know,” he says. “It’s filthy.” I don’t argue.

Nor do they drop the ball at dessert. There’s an intense dark chocolate moelleux, with just an edge of salt. Think next level fondant but pressed into the deeply unforgiving geometry of a cube, with a centre of pure liquid. Finally, we have a sphere of white chocolate, filled with a yuzu-flavoured cream and then, beyond that, a centre of caramelised banana. Desserts are £7.50.

As ever the price I give at the top is for the works, including wine and service, but you could eat here for less. The problem is, once that menu is in your hands, not rampaging through it like an elephant on heat is going to prove a challenge. Skosh does the thing. It’s as simple as that. Buy a train ticket. Now.

Jay’s news bites

• Find of the week. The night before eating at Skosh I stayed at The Plough, a pub hotel at Hayton, East Yorkshire. Its USP: the ‘pub’ is one huge, rather lovely Chinese restaurant called Mr Chu, with an extremely reliable menu of Cantonese staples, plus a few Sichuan dishes. Crispy duck with pancakes, kung po chicken and then to bed. What’s not to like? (mrchuhayton.co.uk).

• Seafood chef Nathan Outlaw has taken over Dubai’s Al Mahara, famous for its utterly bonkers entrance. The restaurant is reached by a lift kitted out as a submarine simulator, designed to convince you that the dining room is not in the basement of the sail-like Burj al Arab hotel, but 90m out across the sea bed.

• The Sethi family, behind Gymkhana and Trishna, is to expand its delivery-only Motu Indian kitchen. As well as bases in Battersea and Camberwell they will now open in Canary Wharf. The food can be impressive; the surfeit of cardboard packaging rather less so.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1