Rowley Leigh, head chef, instigator and one of the owners of the newly opened Le Café Anglais, is a friend of mine. I thought I should get that out of the way. At dinner there last Thursday I saw quite a few friends of mine who, as it happens, are also friends of Rowley's. He is a convivial chap. In setting up the company to run the restaurant, he found himself in the unusual - practically unheard of, I should think - position of having to send some of their money back to investors when it was discovered that the business was 50 per cent oversubscribed.

Le Café Anglais is the realisation of an ambition that has been a long time simmering. Rowley's story is, to some extent, one of redemption through cooking. A period of mucking about after an anarchic, unsatisfactory time at Christ's College, Cambridge (to which he had won an exhibition) had to end when the dole ran out. In 1977 a small ad in the Evening Standard led to a job as grill chef at Joe Allen. The Sturm und Drang of a fast-paced kitchen - where you had to swim or you'd sink - appealed and, since he was a chap who had always sought to be taught properly, after a couple of years he applied to work with the Roux Brothers.

In those days they ran a City restaurant called Le Poulbot, part brasserie, part haute cuisine. In 1986 he was made head chef, a notable promotion.

Moonlighting at weekends to help out his chum Alastair Little, who was cooking at 192 Kensington Park Road, Rowley responded to the element of fun there, the absolute importance, as far as he was concerned, of, yes - conviviality. He wanted to bring the benefits of an arduous training in classic French cooking to a wide audience. As anyone who ate at Kensington Place in the 20 years after he joined as chef in 1987 will know, he succeeded magnificently.

Kensington Place was his sort of place, but it wasn't his. Nick Smallwood, one of the original owners, was first in the queue to invest in the converted McDonald's site that has become the 7,000 sq ft, 170-seater Le Café Anglais on the second floor of Whiteley's with its own entrance in Porchester Gardens.

Rowley's idea of putting rôtisseries at the heart of the restaurant struck me as a risky one. I've seen other chefs and restaurateurs try to do it and after a while their glorious dreams of spinning meats dwindle to a lonely chicken doing the rounds. Rowley has observed that not only is on-a-spit the best way to roast meat but a bank of flames framed in chrome, bronze and black enamel injects an element of theatricality into a restaurant that is not easily replicated at home. How true.

Last Thursday there he was - with his long-time co-chef Colin Westal - behind the bar tending the turning meats, including a raft of game, not quite the priest at the altar as he has invoked, more the devil in front of irresistibly delicious gates of hell. The heat sent out would fell lesser chefs.

The roasts may be the centrepiece but the rest of the assiduously well-composed menu is a delight and a tribute not only to experience but also wide reading and an appreciation of that special love some English have for France - an affair captivatingly described in Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking.

The list of hors d'oeuvres - £3 each, £8.50 for three - took me back to David's books and her particular sensibility. Rabbit rillettes with pickled endives, red peppers with anchovies and egg mimosa, sardines in escabèche, oeuf en gelée, mussels with carrots and dill - all dishes I remember being inspired to prepare when I started cooking.

Caponata (probably in her Italian book), mackerel teriyaki with cucumber salad, Parmesan custard with anchovy toasts, ricotta with olives and chilli; in the two meals I've had so far at Le Café Anglais I have eaten nearly all of the items and they were impeccable. A first course not to miss should you be denying yourself fonduta with salsify and white truffles is pike boudin with fines herbes and beurre blanc, an assembly the brothers Roux would recognise and admire.

In the fish section is poached brill sauce Dugléré, a reference to Adolphe Dugléré, pupil of Carême and chef of the great namesake Parisian restaurant Le Café Anglais founded in 1815 in honour of the peace treaty between England and France. Dugléré's pommes Anna also feature.

Roasts are legion, each thoughtfully sauced or garnished, and in addition there is an evening roast of the day. Vegetables are not an afterthought; you could put together a lovely meal with just them, maybe ceps à la Bordelais with purple sprouting broccoli, creamed spinach and tomatoes persillade.

I am always looking for fresh fruit for dessert. There it is in abundance along with ices, sorbets, queen of puddings, apple charlotte, sherry trifle, rice pudding, bitter chocolate soufflé and more. A detective story could not have been plotted with more care and craft than this menu. And wine list, too.

The size of Le Café Anglais is a blessing as securing a table should not be too great a problem. And here is a particularly convivial fact: up until and including Sunday 18 November, a 50 per cent discount is being applied to food prices.