A new kind of restaurant has emerged as a response to the sad fact that for most people cooking has become a vicarious activity. Instead of preparing a meal, we watch poor "celebrity" saps - given a sharp knife they seem not to know which way is up - being bullied into doing it on TV. Recently the subject of one benighted programme was a countrywide search for the most incompetent cooks who could then be tormented in a good-cop/bad-cop duffingup into turning out something arguably palatable.

We observe others foraging, farrowing, slaughtering on our behalf or swanning round the Mediterranean guaranteeing future unwelcome swarms of visitors to previously hidden-away places or living out an improbable lifestyle where cooking is just another designer prop, then leaf through the matching recipe book and spin a ready-meal in the micro-wave.

Into this gap between intention and reality has come the sort of restaurant where the domestic ideal becomes public gratification. Buying local, seasonal, properly nurtured ingredients, boning joints of meat, filleting fish, putting up preserves, having any amount of ideas of what to do with all of it and a few more just in case dishes run out, eating it joyfully, casually, relatively inexpensively is the way we would like to lead our culinary lives home, but usually can't or don't. The restaurant Great Queen Street which opened in Covent Garden in April this year does all of the above. The menus change in part at every mealtime and dishes are described as tersely as they might be at home when the person responsible for cooking is asked: "What's for supper?"

The owners of Great Queen Street are the same chaps who run The Anchor & Hope in Waterloo, where an identical ethos applies but no bookings are taken.

In our busy, fretful lives we like to book and know when we can eat. At Great Queen Street, the chefs are Tom Norrington-Davies and Trish Hilferty, both publishers of cookery books which we would definitely use at home if only we had the time. The food they prepare is not the sort associated with the idea of a restaurant meal as a special-occasion event. You could eat happily every day, maybe twice a day, at Great Queen Street. I dare say quite a few people do.

Decoration of the deep room culmiatnating in an open kitchen is more or less non-existent. A few little wall lights that look as if they were left over from some previous incarnation of the premises are screwed into walls painted offal red. Tables are bare and glasses are Duralex Picardie, "the ultimate drinking vessel created by man".

Nourishment and conviviality are what matter, and amiable, knowledgeable staff enter into the proposition that a good meal should be part of a day well lived. Prices are kept in check by the lack of investment in décor, the rapid turnover of tables and the fact that carcasses are butchered in-house, offering up every part of a beast from its tongue to its tenderloin.

That the occasional dish falters and is not a great success is what also happens at home when enthusiasm gets the better of repetition. Dishes offered to share for two, three or "five-ish" contribute to the notion that the new eating in is eating out. Interesting wines, many offered by the glass and carafe, are not marked up more than is necessary to turn a bit of a profit.

What Great Queen Street and a few places like it (most of them related) are doing is removing the Us and Them from restaurant-going. It is saying that we are all in this together. Terrific food is not a sacrament to be humbly received but an important thread in daily life. And there is no telly on the premises.