Chef Tong Chee Hwee brings elegance and refinement to classic and updated Cantonese dishes; and the dim sum lunch is a treasure.Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s 55 Brook Street, London W1, tel: 020 7499 0099 When Ramsay took over the Claridge’s restaurant, it became obvious that hotel dining-rooms in this town would never be the same again. Alan Yau has put together an eatery of great style and modernity. But there is no doubt in my mind that Hakkasan is the finest Chinese restaurant in Britain. Hakkasan 8 Hanway Place, London W1, tel: 020 7927 7000 Yes, it is pricey, noisy, in a grungy location, and they make it difficult to get a table at the time you want.

So go – not because it has two stars, but, perhaps, in spite of it.. Pied ?erre differs in that it has real charm, energy, personality and humour, while still conforming to Michelin’s idea of two-starriness. In the past, two-star Michelin restaurants have given me some of my most joyless, tasteless and characterless dining experiences. The cooking, and the thinking behind it, are assured, precise and confident, and the restaurant is now one of the most appealing in London. The touch of salt in the pristine pastry and tart fruit gives it a refreshingly savoury finish.The meal ends with an avalanche of engaging little petits fours – fruit gels, chocolate bags of cream, nougats, the works – plus a glass of pastry lollipops that is borderline kitsch.Osborn can be hailed as one of the few chefs whose skills perfectly match his ambition. It’s a show-off dish but a masterly one, with flavours that are sweet, single-minded and sensational.Roasted monkfish is provocatively treated as meat, paired with a cannelloni of oxtail and ragout of lentils and root vegetables, and finished with a receding foam of frothy sauce – all solid and satisfying stuff.A small hand-picked selection of cheese appears on its own tailor-made trolley, but is left behind by a particularly fine tarte of plum served with cinnamon-honey ice-cream.

The farc?s rich with rabbit kidney, while a parcel of rabbit liver is topped with two pathetically tiny little rabbit cutlets. The resulting 1996 Jean Marc Pavelot Savigny La Beaune (£45) teams so well with a dish of stuffed rabbit saddle and mustard sauce that it is now officially re-named Rabbit Wine.It’s an autopsy of rabbit, presented as three little turrets of boned, stuffed, steamed and browned meat in a wrap of carrot, each amusingly topped with a baby carrot. So I’m pleased it’s a mess, instead of being corseted, manicured and foamed into two-star designer submission.I speak too soon – an amazingly pretty dish of crisply crusted roasted red mullet and deep-fried squid turns up, hand-bagged with baby ratatouille and fennel pur? Too pretty? Perhaps the cocaine-like line of finely ground dried tomato skin that tempers the cockle and saffron vinaigrette is a bit twee but I like its sumac-like acidity.Ordering wine from the beautifully put-together list is a refreshing experience, not least because sommelier Bruno Asselin can describe a wine as if he’s just put down a glass of the stuff to come and take your order. It looks a mess, but tastes earthy and rich, like a millionaire’s Sunday-night tea.