A restaurant so perfect I hesitated to review it

Sometimes you find it, H.G. Wells’s door in the wall, but to tapas: a restaurant so perfect you hesitate to review it. Each critic kills the thing she loves, because to love it is to change it. But I can’t just review palaces for psychotics containing lamps that should not exist, comforting though the idiocies of the very rich are. So here is a review of 28 Church Row, Hampstead. I will try not to make it read like a Hampstead novel about the unreliability of memory, but I might forget to do this.

Church Row is the prettiest street in Hampstead: a ragtag of Georgian houses beloved by television stars who wake up one day, understand they are vulgar and buy a house that isn’t. I can’t afford one, but I saved a man from death in Church Row once, which is unusual for this column. A lorry hit a tree, it toppled and I screamed, and the man under the tree heard me, and ran. He crossed himself; I understood that trees fall silently, and I went to Ikea.

No. 28 was once a home for fallen women, which is perhaps why I like it, for I have never met a fallen woman I did not like. It is a tall, red-brick house at the other end of the street to St John-at-Hampstead church, and inevitably next to an estate agent. Hampstead is all ice cream shops and estate agents these days, though Keith Fawkes’s rare book and antique shop on Flask Walk survives, and you should visit it. The restaurant is in the cellar, down spindly blackened steps. A sign says, too plainly for these dishonest days, ‘Restaurant’.

It looks like my house, if cleaner. No interior designer has been here, but for pleasure. There is no neurosis. There are no fish.

There are two rooms, one large, one small. The first has blue walls, a bar, a drawing of an artichoke on newsprint and a few tables with unmatching chairs. The small room has whitewashed walls and wooden floors. There is a faded rug, some books, an ottoman, a broken lamp and a single brass coat hook. That is, it looks like the old Hampstead of the bourgeois mid-20th-century communist, unconvincing in life, now departed or dead. I miss him because he was so unconvincing: who can fear a communist who wants to live in north London’s aria to the Cotswolds?

The food is Italian and Spanish cuisine, and it is superb, like the good parts of Borough Market without the influencers, or rats. We eat a cheese plate – Monte Enebro, Taleggio, smoked graviera – with apple jam and crackers (£12.50), and we should have had the charcuterie for £14 (pork chorizo, lomo, cecina, salchichon). We eat a 28-day aged sirloin steak (£42), perfectly hung, cooked and sliced; a feo de Tudela (‘ugly tomato’ from Navarre) salad with chives and olive oil (£8), which I will not forget, ever; a courgette salad with confit egg yolk, crispy quinoa, sesame, soya and ginger dressing, which looked frightening but tasted good (£10); chocolate ice cream with hazelnuts and flowers, but I forgive it the flowers, the restaurant cannot know about my 2009 Glastonbury Festival VIP field-related PTSD (£5.50); and a white chocolate mousse with peach and chia seed compote (£9.50).

This is as good as food gets for me. It is both serious and joyful, and I struggle to remember the last time I was this happy anywhere. It was, that night at least, a perfect restaurant, though you, reader, are wise, and you know that perfection is likewise perishable.