Telephone: 020-7794 3785.
Address: 30 Well Walk, London NW3.
Rating: 16.5/20

I can't take somewhere that serves beer only in keg or bottled form seriously as a pub, so in my book the Wells, a long-serving Hampstead boozer, must now be treated as a restaurant. That aspiration to higher gastronomic status is emphasised by the streamlined-to-the-point-of-clinical transformation of the warren of rooms inside the handsome Georgian exterior, the potent wine list and the recruitment of Derrick Creagh to oversee the foundation of the new kitchen and menu.

Creagh is a graduate of the Fat Duck and there are one or two telltale signs - triple-cooked chips and a creamless ice cream - of that education. But, as a whole, the Wells' menu has more in keeping with the Riverside Brasserie, the cadet branch of the Blumenthal empire, than with the more recherché dishes at HQ. Dishes such as warm onion tart with Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire cheese; ox tongue with potato salad and sauce gribiche; sauté of chicken with fondant potato and shaved truffle; and fried salmon with crushed potatoes, sauce vierge and brown shrimps suggest a sensibility rooted in the hearty French tradition. Others, such as chilled cucumber soup with grilled skate and chilli oil, and smoked haddock brandade with deep-fried egg, point to a wider-ranging sense of taste. All in all, it is reminiscent of that former staple of the Anglican church, Hymns Ancient And Modern Revised.

So, in true Anglican fashion, Tucker Thompson and I steered a middle way between the ancient, represented by chateaubriand with chips and sauce bordelaise, rump of lamb with ratatouille, pommes purée and jus gras, and crème brûlée and custard tart, and the modern, in the form of cucumber soup and a pressed leek terrine with pickled girolles. I know that the latter has shades of Marco Pierre White in his Harvey's days, yet it is still in the modern idiom, especially with those pickled girolles. Or it would have been had they been more in evidence. I am not convinced that three very small, if indubitably pickled, mushrooms warrant menu-billing. Still, the rest of the dish met with Tucker's refined approval - "Ooooh, I just lurve leeks" - and was as light and refreshing a start to a meal as you could wish for. I derived similar pleasure from the soup/skate combo. Once again, an advertised element, the chilli oil, hardly made an appearance, but the dish did not suffer hugely as a result. The soup was clean, delicate and full of tiny crunchy cubes of cucumber, while the grilled skate gave a biscuity sweetness.

Tucker's chateaubriand showed that Creagh can do the classics just as well as the novelty items. I don't know if he employed the celebrated Fat Duck slow-cook method for the meat, but it was as tender as you would want any meat to be, with fat thimbles of beef marrow on top, the distinguishing feature of true sauce bordelaise. The chips did not achieve the sublime perfection of the Fat Duck's, but they were several cuts above the average.

My lamb also showed the benefits of careful cooking, and the jus gras was just that: it coated lips and tongue with deeply agreeable richness. The mash was also top-drawer, smooth as velvet but not over-buttery, and seriously potatoey. Given the fact that the meat sat on a cushion of fine spinach, it did not need the ratatouille under that, particularly as the ratatouille in question wasn't in the same class as the other elements in the dish.

We ended with a bayleaf crème brûlée, a custard tart, and a bill of £117.75. I am not convinced by variations on the crème brûlée theme - it's hard enough to get the original to a state of perfection - but this was a better-than-average version. Tucker belted it away with the kind of glossy-eyed content that speaks volumes. My delight in finding a humble custard tart on a menu was compounded by its quality.

So, the size of the bill did not come as a disagreeable surprise. In fact, it would have been a good deal more manageable had we not drunk two bottles of wine, which brought the liquid section to £61.85, leaving £55.90 for the food. If that seems extravagant, well, I suppose it was. My only excuse is that we were celebrating something, although I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Perhaps, it was the arrival of a first-class restaurant in Hampstead.

Open: All week, lunch 12.30pm-3.30pm; dinner 6.30-10.15pm.
Menus: Lunch only, Mon-Sat, £14.50 for two courses, 19.50 for three.
Cards: All major credit cards.
Wheelchair access and WC