Telephone: 0121 233655
Address: 27 Warstone Lane, Hockley, Birmingham

There are few more preposterous sights than that of a restaurant critic at dinnertime in search of a restaurant that doesn't seem to exist. "It must be here somewhere," I said, waving the scrappy piece of paper on which I had written the address of the Restaurant Gilmore. Bleriot and I had been walking up and down Warstone Lane in Birmingham's jewellery district for some minutes. He hooted with laughter: "Ask a policeman," he said. "There," he said, pointing to a nondescript block with a blue light outside. Very Dixon Of Dock Green.

"It hasn't come to that yet," I said. "It must be here somewhere." And so, one phone call later, it proved: in the months between a reader alerting me to the charms of the Restaurant Gilmore and me taking up the challenge, it had become La Toque d'Or. What with the usual cock-up on the trains, sundry other distractions and now this, poor Bleriot was in an almost incoherent state of hysteria/rage by the time we finally made our way into the transmogrified restaurant, and began muttering, "I am very, very hungry. I am very, very hungry." This drew odd looks from the diners already hard at it in the long, narrow dining room decked out in kind of rustic plush. It had a very French, comfortable, slightly old-fashioned air, and was rather restful after the recent overload of light-bright-glass-chrome-mirrors-natural-wood-and-any-colour-so-long-as-it's-white places.

The menu, too, looked interesting, with three courses for £23.50. There was the odd standard item, such as roasted cod with olive-oil-crushed potato and raw seared tuna with tomato confit, and even the dubious promise they offered was given new interest with orange and saffron butter sauce and mullet "marmalade", respectively. Still, they weren't quite interesting enough for me or Bleriot. He fell for a dish of courgette flower with chicken and chive mousse, lamb sweetbread and a light jus; I for artichoke and mackerel tart with herb dressing. Followed by roast quail with spinach and mushrooms, smoked bacon, potato and truffle-scented jus for him and fillet of Aberdeen Angus with wild mushrooms (and a hefty £9.50 supplement) for me. Nothing much wrong with that, you might think. Nor was there. In fact, it was very right. The tart had clear, bright flavours, playing off each other nicely. The mousse was delicately and distinctively flavoured, the sweetbread happily croustillant - that is, slightly crunchy on the outside. The quail dish showed a similar finely-judged instinct for balancing ingredients and sound saucing. My beef was a splendid piece of meat, nicely hung to bring out the flavour, juicy to a judicious degree, with a fine goo of wildish mushrooms with some jolly caramelised shallots. All the dishes were beautifully sauced.

So far so good - but there is a "but". There was no doubting the cooking skill of whoever was the coq of the kitchen, but there was something distinctly retro, not to say neo, about the arrangement of plate furniture. Each was an essay in tiny details of a kind that I thought had gone out of fashion several years ago. For example, the artichoke and mackerel tart consisted of two tiny, perfect rectangular strips of fish that were perfectly aligned on top of artichoke of similar shape on top of the thin layer of pastry. All around were dibs of this and dabs of that. It looked like the ornamentation on an enamel box. A couple of chomps and it was all gone, leaving a yearning for more, much more.

Bleriot filled up on a rum baba with pineapple and coriander salsa and cardamom jus, a very good idea very well executed, with the rum baba light and light-headed with rum, while I finished off the bottle of Bourgogne Irancy with a plate of well-kept English and French cheeses.

The bill came to £86 dead, all in, with £26 going on the booze, £3.50 on water and so £56.50 on the grub. That's not bad at all for cooking of some élan - and in the city of balti, Blanc (Le Petit) and Bank, La Toque d'Or has a disarmingly idiosyncratic and personal touch to it.

· Open Lunch, Tues-Fri, 12.30-2pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 7.30-9.30pm. Menus Lunch, £12.50 for two courses, £15.50 for three; dinner, £23.50 for three courses. Wheelchair access and wheelchair WC.