34 Rupert Street, London W1 ( 020 7439 8777). Meal for two, with drinks and service £100

We expect so much of restaurants. In return for our filthy cash we expect them to send us back out the door feeling a little better than when we went in. Sadly the best we can hope for from the vast majority is that they put the world on pause for an hour or two. Some contrive to suck us dry: they pound us with concepts and throbbing music of a kind designed by the US military for psychological warfare experiments, and with a straining rictus grin of enthusiasm and jollity. Usually these places are staffed by young people; bloody young people, with their optimism and their rising hormones and their unsullied dreams.

I had been avoiding the Palomar, on a garish stretch of Rupert Street just south of London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, because everything I had heard made it sound exactly like one of those places. “Oh it’s great,” said a friend who should know better. “You sit at the bar and chefs do shots with you and there’s music and it’s like a club night.” A club night? I haven’t been to a club night since the Bali Hai in the Merrion Centre, Leeds, circa 1987. And even then I wasn’t convinced it was a good idea. The last thing I want to do now that I’m 48 is go for dinner in a place where they try to give you a prostate massage by turning up the bass on the sound system.

So I devised a cunning plan. I would test this nightspot by daylight. I would go for lunch, when jollity wouldn’t work. Which is what I did. And you know what? I was wrong. I took a seat at the bar with my companion, right by where head chef Tomer Amedi passes the dishes, and we did end up doing shots, and it wasn’t forced jollity. I even forgave some of the young cooks for wearing hats at a jaunty angle and for having nicknames like Mits the Bookie. (Endearingly the names of the entire staff are listed on the daily menu placemats; let’s have more of this sort of thing, please.)

I forgave them all this because the Palomar – the London outpost of a five-strong, achingly hip restaurant group in Jerusalem – serves lovely food. It pulls on the traditions of the Mediterranean fringes without being overwhelmed by them, and it does so with a vigour and enthusiasm which are so utterly infectious that even this professional misanthrope had to get with the project. In London terms it builds on work already done by Yotam Ottolenghi, Honey & Co (see overleaf) and Zest at JW3 but adds its own idiosyncrasies.

We start with a loaf of kubaneh, an air-filled, buttery bread from the Yemen baked in a pot, a little like brioche. Amedi tells us we have to order this because the pastry chef is his wife and his life will be hell if we don’t. It comes with a silky dip of tahini and another called velvet tomatoes, which is the fruit of the vine blitzed and emulsified to something fruity and so rich you could dribble it on almost anything, sweet or savoury. When we order it Amedi rewards us by fetching a bottle of arak, the anise-flavoured fire water from the eastern end of the Med and pours shots for us into egg cups.

It is almost Rosh Hashanah, he says, the Jewish New Year, so let’s toast. I squint at him. “It’s Rosh Hashanah? I am such a bad Jew.” But I am among friends; this Israeli-owned restaurant serves pork belly tagine, mussels and oysters. It laughs in the face of gods who might be picky eaters.

Much of the food is plated on odd lumps of overly ornate crockery – think willow pattern with gilded edges and darker stories – of the sort kept for best by your Great Aunt Sadie who lived in St John’s Wood. A fillet of sea bass, grilled in the Josper, comes on one of those plates with cauliflower which has been braised and caramelised to a profound nuttiness, with an emulsified citrus vinaigrette tangled with fresh green herbs.

Another ceramic relic is used for the softest of tortellini filled with labneh – a light cream cheese – on a thick slick of butternut squash creamed and puréed to within an inch of its life. Artfully scattered mangetout add crunch, and confit garlic a deeper note altogether. We have a salmon sashimi on petals of cured onion with the punch of ginger, and a small pot of polenta whipped with a dribble of truffle oil and topped with curls of parmesan, button mushrooms and an asparagus spear.

Amedi hands us two tiny spoons with which to eat it. I offer to play the spoons, a trick learned from my old dad. He grabs two drumsticks from amid his mise en place and gives it the full Buddy Rich across every metal surface down below and hanging from above. How was I to know kitchen drumming was his thing? There are YouTube videos of him doing it back at the Jerusalem bar he headed up before coming here.

The dishes keep coming: two deep-fried croquettes of braised lamb shoulder, and a yogurt and garlic sauce to pull them through; a couple of rock oysters with harissa oil and coriander (which happily taste only of oyster rather than their dressings); a sprightly fattoush salad thick with sumac. There is a take on steak tartare which sees the finely chopped beef given a helping hand from tahini, fresh herbs and pine nuts. Finally a big round of that braised pork belly, the colour of rusted iron, on a bed of apricots and pearl couscous, the little beads bursting pleasingly against the roof of your mouth.

There are only three desserts, so we order them all: a truly wondrous milk-chocolate delice with a base of puffed rice, a perfect orange syrup-drenched semolina cake, and a milk pudding scented with rosewater which would only be your thing if you like a touch of the perfume counter with your dessert.

Smaller dishes are around £8, with the mains topping out at £15. And at the end the bottle of arak comes out again. We must have a toast, Amedi says, firing off a phrase in Hebrew. Which means? “To life, good fortune, and lots of healthy sex.” I’m not arguing with that. We knock back our drinks and head for the door, certain the Palomar is one of those places which makes life a little bit better.

Jay Rayner’s novel The Apologist is available as an eBook from Amazon, priced £2.99

Jay’s news bites

■ Honey & Co, run by Israeli husband-and-wife team Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer, is the fabulous small restaurant which helped set the Jerusalem food agenda in London. Both previously worked with Ottolenghi – and it shows, especially in the glorious pastries. Do also try the mezze with the likes of carrot and butternut-squash fritters, their own garlicky hummus, plus other dishes like octopus with chilli and coriander (honeyandco.co.uk).

■ Calling cooks of all abilities. Next spring McSweeney’s publishes All Under Heaven by Carolyn Phillips, covering 35 Chinese culinary traditions. To make sure the recipes work, they are asking members of the public to go to their website to volunteer to test. In return you’ll get a discount on a copy (visit mcsweeneys.net/books/allunderheaven for details).

■ Say farewell to the glass milk bottle, which accounted for 94% of all milk containers in 1975. Now it’s just 4% and is to fall even further with the announcement by Dairy Crest that it will close its last glass-bottle plant in 2016. After that it’s plastic all the way.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1