Paris, The Mailbox, 109-111 Wharfside Street, Birmingham (0121 632 1488).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £120

Late last year, Birmingham acquired a new attraction: a 60m Ferris wheel offering marvellous views of places that aren't Birmingham. There was only one problem: the wheel had last done service in Paris and still had the French commentary tape in the deck.

So, as the wheel turned, the good people of the West Midlands were informed that, 'A la droite, vous voyez le Tour Eiffel', when what they were really looking at was the gasworks at Smethwick, which, I'm told, are just like Monsieur Eiffel's folly, only with fewer stairs.

Following Paris the commentary comes Paris the restaurant. It occupies a prime site in the city's new Mailbox complex, a glossy shopping centre which smells of money much as a gym smells of sweat; it is as overt an expression of a city's new-found self-confidence as one could wish for. To reach Paris, one must first walk past outposts of Harvey Nicks, Armani and Bang & Olufsen. Paris, a venture from the veteran and sometime Michelin-starred chef Pat McDonald, sits comfortably here.

This is my way of saying that it is a boisterously expensive product: starters at a tenner, main courses double that, wine prices with which to celebrate that management buy-out. And jolly good, says I.

In my last Birmingham review I whined about the dearth of good restaurants in the city. I can't moan now that one has turned up giving it every bell and whistle in the marching band. Or I could, but I'd deserve a slapping. This is a place of obvious and grand ambition, from the high mahogany walls to the stagey oil paintings, to the violent frottage committed with a cappuccino whipper on every milk-based sauce. Paris: never knowingly under-foamed.

All those frothy bubbles are a distraction, an attempt to shout modernism, when really, this place is all about rich, ripe classicism. It owes much more to early Nineties Marco Pierre White than, say, the 21st-century fancies of Heston Blumenthal. Beneath the pillow of foam in the amuse bouche, for example, lay a light, balanced pumpkin soup, suitably sprinkled with powdered cep. When we pushed aside the foam on my companion's luscious starter of lobster ravioli we found a shellfish sauce of depth and power.

My risotto of ceps (with its own dainty necklace of foam) was the only thing that wasn't to my taste. The texture was too rice pudding-ish and the noble specimen of wild mushroom it contained had first been pickled, which suggested a lack of fungi-respect. Main courses were back on track. For him, a Savoy cabbage leaf stuffed with pigeon breast and a pigeon farci, plus by-the-book fondant potatoes. For me, a stuffed pig's trotter, looking unashamedly like the business end of a pig's leg, perfectly boned and stuffed (pace Pierres Koffman and White) and with a generous scattering of morels. When a kitchen can be fagged to bone out a pig's trotter and then cook it to buggery and back, you know they mean business.

The lunch time we went, the Mailbox was all but empty. And yet Paris was doing a brisk trade. Those wine prices may be fierce. Cheese - a very good selection, very well kept - may cost £9.50. But the fat wallets of Britain's second city were crowding in - which proves that if you build it, they will come, even in Birmingham. I may just get to like the place.