11 Bayley Street, London WC1 (020 7323 9694). Meal for two, £75
From time to time I get emails from television producers who are gagging to capture on camera the intense, laser-guided, obsessive-compulsive business of being a restaurant critic. Like physicists attempting to identify the Higgs boson, they want to record the exact moment of "opinion", of prejudice or love being forged in my cholesterol-drenched heart. They are convinced there is something to witness. In reality there is nothing to see, save for a middle-aged man with too much hair – too much, frankly, of everything – plundering feverish and sweaty platefuls of food while gossiping filthily with pals.
Occasionally I nick bits of food off their plates. Sometimes I glance at a menu. I'm always thinking. You can see that in my eyes, because thinking is Hard. I'm trying to work out what the hell to say about the latest clumsy, malicious violation of a classic recipe. This would make for very poor television.
But there was a moment during my visit to Gail's Kitchen. A point, four or so dishes into lunch, when I stopped, knife and fork held aloft, and stared quizzically at a bowl of roasted butternut squash and carrots with a few bitter buttered greens, some raisins and pine nuts; a dish of winter with a spring in its step. We were, I said to my companion, being fed exceptionally well. And up to that point, very little with a pulse had been involved. The food was remarkable for being meat free and unshowy. There was no dismal wow factor, but there was quite a lot of gosh. Quickly we returned to our conversation.
Gail's Kitchen is a new venture from the bakery Gail's. It's all white walls and rough wood tables and artfully unartful displays of flowers and fruit. It's Carluccio's with distressed edges and looks like the kind of place you'd find in Notting Hill. Instead it is off the neon-crusted, consumer electronics-infested end of Tottenham Court Road.
As the place has a bakery in its DNA, bread underscores the food. Among the snacks are sourdough soldiers, on this day spread with hot, wobbly and mustardy Welsh rarebit. Sweet smoked prawns came with a poky aïoli and a still-hot slice of garlic-smeared sourdough toast. Bread crops up again as a brittle crumb of maple and mustard croutons scattered across warm baby leeks with a perfect vinaigrette and chopped eggs with yolks on the knife-edge between set and runny.
The menu of small plates, between £6 and £10, is strong on this vibrant non-meat cookery: there's polenta chips with Gorgonzola; battered herbs with fresh goat's curd and honey; roasted beetroot with lentils, soft cheese and flat bread; Spanish rotolo with ricotta and wild mushrooms.
But of course something had to die for our lunch. It was long-braised oxtail, with a baked Ratte potato. It was deep and rich and sticky and showed the benefit of baking something other than bread in a bread oven. Our other meat dish, a steak sandwich with Comté cheese, watercress and grated horseradish, was let down by the slices of tasteless rare beef. We should have stuck with the vegetables.
We finished with their take on rum baba: syrup-soaked sponges with fruit compote and a dollop of whipped cream – to the tongue as cool cotton bed sheets are to hot, tired feet. Better still were the chocolate-chip cookies, baked to order so that the chocolate was almost liquid. They came with a school-sized bottle of chilled milk complete with striped straw. It is a knowing nod to childhood.
The dishes turn up in a random order, and the tables are far too small to accommodate them. But for thoughtful, big-boned cooking like this I can forgive them that. It is food that actually stopped me eating for a moment. Take a picture: that doesn't happen often.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile jayrayner for all his reviews in one place. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
