Le Gavroche, 43 Upper Brook Street, London W1 (020 7499 1826).
Lunch, including absolutely everything, £99

Last Monday night was not a good time to be eating out in London. Every major kitchen in the capital - and quite a few minor ones - would have been in the hands of the third or fourth in command, as the rest of them swanned off to the ITV London Restaurant Awards, to either toast each other or drown themselves in liquor, depending upon how the results went. The best front-of-house award went this year to Le Gavroche, the great temple to high French gastronomy now in the nimble hands of Michel Roux Jr, the son of Albert, who, with his brother Michel Sr, founded it in Mayfair at the end of the Sixties.

I cannot take issue with the decision, not least because I was one of the judges, as I have been for the past few years. It is a compliment to previous winners to say that, every time we have sat down to judge this particular award, Le Gavroche has always been close to, or at the top of, our shortlist. Much of the time it has felt like we were looking for reasons not to give them the gong. The fact is, Silvano Giraldin is the best maitre d' in London by a very long chalk and runs an extraordinarily tight operation. Anybody who aspires to providing good service should beg Silvano to let them spend some time with him, here amid the thick claret and green plush of the downstairs dining room, with its hefty napery and the glint of polished silver from every table. If I were a less polite man I'd tell you Silvano is the bollocks, but I'm not, so I won't.

I remember him once coming to our table and taking our order with his hands behind his back, and acknowledging our choices with a gleeful smile, as if he genuinely approved of our taste. 'Did you see that?' I said to my wife. 'He didn't take a single note of anything we said.' No, my wife replied, but the kid standing 10ft away with the notebook did. It was a classic, and very effective piece of stage misdirection. But then great front-of-house service should cleave to the verities of great theatre. At Le Gavroche it does.

I will not pretend it is affordable glamour. If anything it is unaffordable glamour. I have gone there for my birthday (and paid with my own money, by God) and smelt the burning plastic as I have picked up the 200-something quid tab. But you get what you pay for and here it is classical French cooking with the occasional modern touch, plus a few serious big boy's dishes: I have eaten grouse at Le Gavroche properly garnished, and roast woodcock, served with the head bisected and impaled on the breast by its long thin beak in the traditional manner. If that appals you then you are reading the wrong columnist.

There are, however, less full-on items available at Le Gavroche, plus ways to enjoy them. Because, while it is undoubtedly one of the most expensive restaurants in London, it also happens to serve what I think is the best value lunch in town. I'm not going to tell you its cheap (not least because I get tired of receiving outraged emails from Gateshead, pointing out the price of a terraced house up there), but for lunch at a Michelin two-star with the award-winning attentions of Silvano and his staff, this cannot be beaten: three courses, coffee and petits fours, half a bottle of mineral water each, and half a bottle of wine for £44 a head. And the wine isn't just cheap plonk: the lunchtime I went it was a serious bit of Saint-Emilion or Côtes de Provence, Chorey-les-Beaunes from Domaine Chanson or Pinot Blanc by Leon Beyer. Throw in the 12.5 per cent service added to the bill, and its £99 for two, all in.

The food, from a set menu with three choices at each course, is solid and reassuring. So to start there are unadvertised canapes of a fat tempuraed langoustine each, and a sliver of toast topped by a scoop of rillettes and a curl of black truffle, and then a little seafood mousse studded with chunks of lobster. Next we split two starters between us, so we each had a small slice of a 'marbled' terrine of chicken and potted pork, leeks and mushrooms and a whole bunch of other things beside, served not too cold with a slick of vinaigrette and a slice of toasted country bread. Then a light, wild mushroom souffle, decorously collapsing into a ripe chicken veloute. (The other starter was a mussel soup scented with saffron.)

The main courses we tried were perfectly finessed classic French bistro food: a crisp-skinned leg of duck confit for my companion, with sauteed potatoes, in a deep duck jus, the whole dressed with cep oil. And for me a good thick sirloin of Aberdeen Angus served au point, with a crust of breadcrumbs and bone marrow, and a shallot sauce. All of this comes with the Gavroche theatre which, in other hands, might seem gauche and hackneyed but here is done so well it does not: cloches are lifted, or ingredients are presented on silver platters before being plated and sauces are added from dinky little jugs. There is a trolley of stinky French cheeses roaming the room and another for ice creams and sorbets, from which we particularly enjoyed scoops of their mango and their apple. A plate of profiteroles, a cup of coffee, a dish of petits fours, and out into the afternoon, £99 lighter. Though obviously, a few other kinds of pound heavier. Save up. Take a day off work. It's worth it.