Editor’s note: this review took place before the current lockdown was imposed

The Elder at the Indigo Hotel, 2-8 South Parade, Bath BA2 4AB (01225 530 616). Three dinner courses £45, three lunch courses £35, two dinner courses £37.50, two lunch courses £27.50, wines from £25

Recently, in a restaurant in Bath, I got indecently excited about a soufflé. To be fair, at The Elder I got excited about a lot. God, it felt good, experiencing this raging bubble of happiness rise up inside me. And all because of what a clever man called Darrell had done with whipped egg whites and sugar, damsons and stupid amounts of perseverance. I forgot that the waiters were wearing masks, and that the tables were set wide apart, and that the government is run by a bunch of sweaty-cheeked walking prolapses who are making it up as they go along.

That’s what great cooking does. It makes the world seem better, even if only for as long as it takes to scrape the ramekin clean. No, you can’t make this at home for a quarter of the price. To try it you have to come here to The Elder, the restaurant of the newly opened Indigo Hotel. Even that last line is thrilling. Right now, everything is closure and “God help us.” Depressingly, it’s all justifiable closure and “God help us.” There’s very little in the way of a bright side upon which we may look.

And yet here’s Mike Robinson, the chef renowned for his game cookery; for dishes involving words like haunch and faggot and shin, opening a new restaurant into the gnashing teeth of a pandemic. It’s surely madness. If so, it’s welcome madness, a giddy expression of optimism. Apparently, they’d spent five years working on the project, and finally it was ready. They decided to unlock the doors anyway.

The result, located within a terrace of those Georgian honeyed townhouses that Bath has in shameless number, is a beauty: a series of linked rooms, their panelled walls painted a deep-sea green and hung with hunting prints. There are globe lights and dark wood floors and banquettes of leather the colour of the best butterscotch. Down the hall on the great trek to the loos are murals of pretty woodland creatures of the sort the menu will soon invite you to eat.

This is a feature of game restaurants. They enjoy sentimentalising their ingredients. Still, few chefs know as much about the business of well-managed, sustainable hunting as Robinson. He made his name at the Pot Kiln in Berkshire before opening the Woodsman (also inside an Indigo Hotel) in Stratford-upon-Avon. He co-owns the Harwood Arms in Fulham, which turned the venison scotch egg into a luxurious culinary fetish item. Along with his executive chef here, Gavin Edney, he plays to the gallery, as long as that gallery is full of game lovers. For the record there’s also an evolved vegan and vegetarian menu. Think coffee-roasted carrots with dukkah and salt-baked celeriac with onion juices. But I can’t lie. I’ve not come to The Elder for coffee-roasted carrots, however lovely they might be.

Dinner starts with a grandiose nod to huntsman culture: their version of bullshot tea. It’s a glass of lip-smacking venison stock enriched with sherry, served hot and, on the side, a crisp-crusted mini-loaf of still-warm granary bread and salted butter. I have no interest in shooting woodland creatures. It’s not part of my skill-set. I can play a mean version of Cole Porter’s Love for Sale at the piano. Killing my dinner? Not so much. But if it always began like this, with a grown-up’s version of Bovril, I’d be there, if only to wave off the hunt.

Among the starters is a warm crab tart, which has me blinking and grinning and hunting around for useful comparisons. Let’s try this. It’s the Judi Dench of crab tarts: classy, technically brilliant, compelling but also moving and hugely satisfying. The next-door table of four all order this. Normally I’d judge them for so doing, because I’m horrid. Couldn’t they have mixed it up a bit so they got to try a few different things? With this piece of culinary magic, I don’t blame them at all. There’s a crisp, golden pastry shell, secured on the plate by a disc of lemon mayonnaise. There’s a layer of white crab meat and a layer of the brown meat for punch and, on top of that, a brassic, hot and sour chimichurri, like a neatly mown lawn. It’s that rare thing: immense precision in the interests of appetite. All of those qualities are also there in a tartare of sea bream with tiny cubes of apple and oily smoked eel, under a puffed rice cracker flavoured with squid ink and dotted with whipped cod’s roe.

There’s a lot going on with the mains. too: a partridge breast partners a ball of stuffed savoy cabbage and a sweetcorn tart with black pudding; deep pink venison comes with red cabbage purée and beetroot, and so on. Both have intense sauces. Bravo. But I’m distracted by a side dish of what they call “dirty mash”. It’s a pot of Joël Robuchon-style pommes purée, as much butter as potato, flooded with a copious amount of a reduced venison jus bobbing with shards and tangles of meat. I don’t much hold with giving food moral labels like clean or dirty. People have morals. Food doesn’t. But if they regard this as dirty, please never let me be clean again.

And then the desserts. There’s an exquisitely made lime meringue pie, again with the requisite crisp pastry, the zingy lime filling and so on. But it’s that beautifully risen damson soufflé that fair takes my breath away. For baked into its surface is a perfect, sugar-dusted shortbread biscuit. Pastry chefs live in fear of their soufflés not rising. And yet this one has put a bloody biscuit on the top, which can surely only weigh it down. I ask our waiter how it’s done. Darrell Rolle-Jackson, the brilliant pastry chef, comes out to explain. It took years to perfect, he says. It’s about getting the biscuit as thin as possible and then freezing it. Don’t bother trying this at home. You’ll fail.

In last week’s review of Townsend, I talked about the joys of undistracting food. Here at The Elder it’s all about the joy of engrossing food; of cooking that demands you look down; of a kitchen under Edney which knows exactly what it’s doing. They charge £45 for three courses (£35 at lunch) and you can see exactly where that money is going. The opening of a new restaurant in the current circumstances is reassuring enough. The fact that it’s such a good one is a brilliant beam of sunshine breaking through a bruising, cloud-deadened sky.

News bites

As the new lockdown kicks in, we return to delivery options. First up, a reminder that the subject of last week’s review, Townsend at the Whitechapel Gallery, has been running a nationwide delivery service throughout. It includes not only their own dishes, in a set of varied recipe boxes, but also a lot of basic products through the quality supplier Natoora (townsendrestaurant.co.uk).

In a similar vein, the terrific Spanish produce company Brindisa, which supplies both its own restaurants and many others with top Iberian produce, has a nationwide delivery service. They also run various promotions; recently it’s been cheese week (brindisa.com).

And finally, chef Adam Handling’s Hame service – the Scottish word for home – lists some seriously high-end delivery boxes starting at £130 for two for Sunday lunch and topping out at £305 for two for the “Who Are You Trying To Impress?” box. Good question. It includes wagyu and caviar tartare, beef wellington and a tarte tatin. As ever I am only the messenger, so don’t shoot me (adamhandling.co.uk).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1