Swanky central London hotel restaurants tend to be as intimate as airport departure lounges, so I didn’t have particularly high hopes for Avista, based in Mayfair’s Millennium Hotel.

However, aside from the name, which sounds off-puttingly like a hopeful team from The Apprentice, Avista is streets ahead of its peers.

For starters I went for a lush and velvety dry-cured beef bresaola with rocket, goat’s cheese, caramelised onions and walnuts (£10). The date went for an octopus salad with pimento, pigna beans and roast peppers (£9.50). Both dishes were surprisingly hearty, boldly doing the classic Italian thing of allowing simple, top-quality ingredients to speak for themselves.

Mains took a while coming, but the date’s beautifully cooked rack of lamb with tapenade, Swiss chard and cute little mushrooms (£24.50) was worth the wait. And if my excellent pan-fried sea bass with artichokes (£23.50) still left me hungry, I soon filled the hole with dessert.

You had to love the way “hot chocolate foam with raspberries and ginger” (£6.50) sounded ever so dainty and light but was in fact a lagoon of milk chocolate around a chilled, but gorgeously gooey, dark chocolate core.

The date was rewarded with a veritable mountain range of cheeses (£9.50) — but no bread. They’d clearly run out. Our request for carbs was met by a scurry to the kitchen and what must have been a quick nip to the local Costcutter, because a standard cracker assortment appeared within minutes. Initiative that Sir Alan would be proud of.