Wines are kept in the centre of the place, in the old vault, and there’s an air of tidy, efficient order. All the chefs wear country-check shirts with green aprons and the staff – led by chef patron Nicholas Balfe, who has a small group of highly rated restaurants in London – are in dark jeans and khaki shirts.

We plunged gloriously into dinner with a pair of perfectly dry and spiced negronis and something called Westcombe cheddar fries. These turn out to be little rectangular puffs of cheese, drenched in a Somerset pecorino. The texture was of fluffy potato, the flavour just as cheesy as I like at this stage of dinner (which is moderate, by the way).

My starter was a light and delicate chicken liver parfait, which might shock those fat-fingered locals, but was nectar to those exposed happily to metropolitan ways.

Emily, meanwhile, had a dish entitled ‘mussels, leeks, cider’ which was an elegant dish of mussels removed from their shells and sitting in a tasty broth with spots of basil oil, a crunchy, thin crisp bread hovering over to lend additional sophistication.

She then had a pile of gnudi – which I thought she should have as I like saying gnudi and because she loves to lay on the carbs and cheese as thick as possible at night.