Pompette, 7 South Parade, Oxford OX2 7JL (01865 311166). Snacks, starters, charcuterie and cheeses £4.50-£14. Mains £16-£36. Desserts £6.50-£8.50. Wines from £19

Being a journalist is a licence to ask outrageous questions. A notebook in your hand is a badge. It says: I am not asking you about this sensitive matter because I am nosy, but because my job demands it. Now tell me again, you did what? With whom? And exactly how much Swarfega was involved? Not long after I took over this column 20 years ago, I concluded that a notebook and a restaurant table were the perfect combination. People relax when they are eating well. Then they talk.

This has been proved to me time and again over the past couple of months as I’ve taken a bunch of starry names out for lunch, fed them well and asked them those outrageous questions for a new podcast. You will want to know that Richard E Grant, who is obsessed by smells, practically buried his nose in a bowl of white truffle pasta at Sartoria, and inhaled; that Stanley Tucci shared with me the pain of failing to roast a pig’s head adequately, while eating at Locanda Locatelli; that Mel C suggested ordering all the desserts at the Brasserie of Light. And if this sounds like I’m shamelessly plugging my wares, of course I am. I had lunch with an actual Spice Girl and two Oscar nominees, plus a whole bunch of others besides. I’m not keeping quiet about that.

Pompette in Oxford’s Summertown is where you should take people if you want to get them to confess to almost anything. It is the kind of classic French restaurant that the British middle-classes adore, which makes them feel secure and happy and understood. In Summertown they have hit the mother lode. Here they are, mostly the elders of the tribe spending money on themselves rather than their grown-up kids, poring over a menu of dishes they recognise from holidays in the Dordogne and their now dog-eared copies of Elizabeth David. They are cosmopolitan and worldly and open to the new. But sometimes what they need is culinary reassurance. That’s exactly what Pompette supplies. The name roughly means “tipsy”. Come here and become what the name says.

The chef is Pascal Wiedemann, who worked at Henry Harris’s Racine, before opening Terroirs near London’s Charing Cross. He and his wife Laura came here last October to a space of bare brick walls, banquettes and polished floorboards. It probably required little more to transform it from a previous incarnation than the hanging of a few French prints and the adding of the letters “te” to the word toilet. Open up the knife roll, get in the ingredients and go.

One side is a designated bar area, with its own menu of charcuterie, cheeses and terrines, which old hands from Terroirs may recognise. Here are pork rillettes and saucisson de Montagne, Morbier and Brillat-Savarin. Our waiter made a feeble attempt to suggest we weren’t meant to order any of it on the restaurant side, but I reassured her it was in addition to, not instead of. I wasn’t going to miss out on toast, thickly spread with cool butter, then laid with tiny rings of shallot and slinky ribbons of salted anchovy. We were given a bowl of the Lyonnaise favourite cervelle de canut – fromage blancs with herbs, shallots and fighty cider vinegar – to dredge crackers through as we made our choices.

We order a whole globe artichoke, with the thistle removed as it should be, accompanied by a substantial bowl of vinaigrette made with dollops of nose-tickling mustard. A deep, plunging bowl of fish soup, the colour of copper pans polished to a shine, is the distillation of the bits of fish and seafood we leave behind. You do not need to ask whether there is gruyère and croutons and garlicky rouille on the side, because here they are. Pile one atop the other then catch them on your spoon before they sink into the depths.

A snowy piece of hake arrives atop a pile of Umbrian lentils, half a roasted lemon to one side. The edges of the fish are the same colour as the soup; the skin is crisp. Thick-cut lamb chops, which have been given a proper seeing to by the grill, are smeared with more salted anchovy, melting in the heat. There is purple sprouting broccoli because we must all have our greens. The lamb leaks its juices into the mess of anchovy and vice versa. This is cooking which makes its mark not through invention and fireworks, but by pressing into service knowledge of the classics and extremely good taste. Each dish arrives. You check it over, realise that everything is as it should be and return to your conversation.

Stay for dessert because they’ve made the effort. An impeccable disc of meringue, piped into the curls and curlicues of Georgian cornicing, is filled with whipped cream and piled with candy pink rhubarb and bright green pistachio nuts. A sizable cream-filled choux bun with a crunchy caramel glaze is surrounded by griottine cherries and presented with a jug of hot chocolate sauce. Yes, and please.

There’s a strong choice of wines by the glass and half-litre carafe, starting at a reasonable £19 a bottle. Put that together with their three-course fixed price lunch menu at £20 and Pompette can be good value, though there’s no pretending: the main menu pricing is robust. After all this is Summertown, where the media lot and the university lot and the bookish lot live. Here the only things that are free are opinions. Starters meander around the £10 mark with mains at a little more than double that. The bill will mount up if you go for it.

Then again a place like this is worth saving up for. A few months back I came to Oxford and rolled my eyes at a hotel which traded off complacency and the apparent acquiescence of its customer base. It’s a delight to return to Oxford and find the good stuff. I would have enjoyed engaging the people sitting around me in conversation about Oxford’s curious restaurant sector, but they were far too busy interrogating each other. That’s what good restaurants are for.

News bites

For a totally different Oxford experience try My Sichuan, located close to the station. Meat eaters should not miss the crisped lamb ribs with salt, chilli and cumin, the fat hot and running. There is pork belly braised long and slow in soy, on a bed of Chinese cabbage to make you feel better about yourself, and a whole sea bass Chengdu style, under bean curd and a sauce of chilli and garlic.

Mr Thomas’s Chop House in Manchester permanently changed its name earlier this month, just in time for International Women’s Day, to Mrs Sarah’s Chophouse, in recognition of Mrs Sarah Studd and her daughter Sarah who ran it from 1875 to 1901. The women were trailblazers at a time when women weren’t even allowed inside such venues as customers (mrssarahschophouse.com).

Next weekend Brighton plays host to VegfestUK which, as the name suggests, celebrates meat-free lifestyles. Operators in the food village include Bangkok Noodle Bar, Green Grill and Dominion Brewery. Day tickets are £8 (brighton.vegfest.co.uk).

The first episode of Jay Rayner’s new weekly podcast Out to Lunch features Richard E Grant and is available on all platforms from 19 March

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

• This article was amended on 17 March 2019. In the production process, the names of Spice Girls Mel B and Mel C had become muddled.