Day one: I’m flying to London by British Airways after a gap of many years. The ground handling has vastly improved but the First Class seems much less impressive than it did in the old days. The screens are small, the wines are mediocre, they don’t have one of the champagnes listed and the crew, all of whom seem to have been flying for 40 years or so, are efficient without being overly hospitable. I’m not sure whether British Airways has changed or all the other airlines have caught up.

   I’m supposed to transfer at Heathrow to a flight to Dublin. I have two hours to make the transfer, time enough, I think for a coffee in the lounge.

   My plane is denied a gate in the terminal and parks miles out on the tarmac. It takes them ages to bus us in. Then, we climb up and walk around Terminal 5 till we find the connections gate. This leads to a bus which drives us – through a tunnel for much of the journey – to Terminal 1 which is about ten minutes away.

   At Terminal 1, the immigration queue moves so slowly that it takes 20 minutes to get through. Then we stand in another queue for biometric testing or something. Next we go down an escalator and queue up for boarding cards. Then we walk for ten minutes to the gate. But before we can board, we queue up again for more biometric testing.

   Eventually, I barely make the flight.

   Why on earth would anyone want to transfer at Heathrow?

Day two: Much of Day One and Day Two has been spent in Dublin where I had gone to see Leonard Cohen in concert. (The subject of another column, I think.) But I’m back in London in the evening.

   After a slightly disastrous experience at the Intercontinental on Park Lane (why would anybody want to stay there?), I end up at the newly refurbished Grosvenor House. The hotel looks great but staff ratios do not seem to have improved so there is a noticeable lack of service and there are no English people visible anywhere in the hotel either among the staff or the guests, most of whom are of the oil-rich persuasion. Well, they did tell us that London was becoming an international city.

   Dinner is at an old favourite, the Wolseley. It always astonishes me that though the Wolseley is among London’s trendiest restaurants and that it can be hell to get a table, the staff are uniformly friendly and unaffected and treat every guest like a VIP – so different from Indian restaurants where it matters who you are.

   On this occasion, the table takes ten minutes to clear so they move us to the bar and say that all drinks are on the house. It’s not that they know me or anything. This is just how a very good restaurant takes responsibility for not honouring a booking on time. The meal is terrific. There are fresh oysters from Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall, spicy steak tartare, garlicky snails and a double lamb chop. Service is cheerful and the restaurant buzzes with life.

Day three: I go to Gieves & Hawkes on Savile Row to be measured for a suit. Afterwards – perhaps in an attempt to revive me once they’ve told me how much it costs – Mark Henderson, the chief executive of Gieves & Hawkes, takes me to lunch.

   We go to Sartoria, probably the nicest restaurant on the Row. I went there years ago when Terence Conran had just opened it and was pleased to find the great man himself at the next table. My recollection of Sartoria is that it was pleasant enough but vastly over-priced.

   Either the prices are more reasonable now or everything seems good value after Savile Row tailoring but I think that it is okay value for good food: risotto with summer truffles, tagliatelle with courgettes, wild rabbit and octopus carpaccio.

   Mark is great company and the lunch is an absolute delight.

   I’m back at another old favourite (though not as much of a favourite as the Wolseley) for dinner. Nahm is probably the only Thai restaurant in the world to hold a Michelin star. It is run by David Thompson, an Australian chef who has written the definitive book on Thai cuisine and who is so highly respected in Thailand that the government has asked him to set up a school to train chefs.

   Thompson made his reputation in his native Australia at a restaurant called The Darley Street Thai where he served dishes made according to old Thai family recipes. (It was during this avatar that he came to India to cook at the Thai Pavilion in Bombay.)

   Nahm is less traditional and consists of Thompson’s riffs on Thai cuisine. It’s not the kind of Thai food you’ll find in Bangkok but it works because the chef is such a master of Thai flavours. We eat a seafood salad, green curry, stir fried beef and lots of other Thai staples given the Thompson twist.

   It’s a good meal but not one of the best I’ve had at Nahm. One member of our party says he prefers the food at the Thai Pavilion. This is an unfair parallel because the Pavilion’s menu is traditional and Nahm’s is modern. But Thompson and the Pavilion’s Ananda Solomon are friends.

Day four: I intend to go to Yauatcha for the brilliant dimsum but just before I get there I notice that Brindisa, the well known importers of Spanish products into the UK, have opened one of their tapas restaurants on the same street. On the grounds that it is always worth trying something new, I take Brindisa over Yauatcha.

   I don’t think the food is as spectacular as Yauatcha’s dimsum but it is very good indeed. There are small prawns fried in garlic and olive oil, a salad of razor clams, excellent chorizo on country bread and a variety of wonderful vegetable dishes. The peas are sweet and flavoured with parsley as a contrast to the lumps of pancetta with which they are cooked, the French beans also have a porky flavour and the patatas bravas are nice and crunchy.

   That evening, I make the journey to Sketch. When the restaurant opened, it created a stir because it was so over the top. Located in a town house on Conduit Street (the former London headquarters of Christian Dior), the complex has many aspects: a tea room with divine pastry, a great bar and a funky area which has art exhibitions during the day and turns into a club at night.

   But most of the excitement centered on the main restaurant called the Lecture Room. It had food by Pierre Gagnaire, a three star French chef, but the fuss was about the décor. Sketch is littered with works of art and the bathrooms are worthy of a place in any museum that deals in modern installation art.

   Originally the Lecture Room was treated as being wildly expensive but it has now brought prices down so it is on par with other London restaurants of its type.

   The service was gracious and extraordinary, the sort of thing you would expect in a three star restaurant in Paris. The food was slightly hit and miss though most of it was excellent: The tasting menu includes Lobster Salad, Red Mullet, Mr Thilbault’s Garden Vegetables,  Barsac and cheese.

   I was especially impressed by the sommelier. I pulled my usual stunt of giving him a modest price barrier and asking him to find a wine that would not only go with my food but would also surprise me. He found two: a brilliant red shiraz from Languedoc and a wonderful white Graves.

   It’s not the sort of restaurant you want to go back to again and again. But it’s a great experience.

Day five: No proper lunch because I spent much of the day on the road but I decided to try an Indian restaurant for dinner.

   People who run restaurants in London, such as my friend Namita Panjabi, will tell you that London is now the capital of Indian food because chefs in that city are more willing to be adventurous than chefs in India. And certainly, London has many Michelin starred Indian restaurants now: Namita’s Amaya, Vineet Bhatia’s precedent-shattering Rasoi, the rather boring Tamarind and Atul Kochhar’s much hyped Benares.

   I’ve tried the other three so I thought I’d give Benares a shot. Kochhar is a former Oberoi chef who is much feted by the British media for his understanding of Indian cuisine and his ability to bring out the flavours of his ingredients.

   Ours was the only Indian table at Benares though later some local Sardarjis made an appearance. Most of the guests were Europeans and Americans and at least some had no experience of Indian food judging by the questions they asked the waiters.

   I’m a great fan of modern Indian food. I’m not one of those people who believes that chefs should only reproduce ancient recipes. I believe a cuisine only advances when chefs play around with techniques, ingredients and flavours. For instance, the one meal I had at Vineet Bhatia’s Rasoi some years ago was a revelation because of the risks Bhatia took with the food and the panache with which he pulled off his more outrageous concepts (butter chicken gravy in ice cream form!).

   I offer all this as preface to my views on Benares to indicate that unlike many Indians I like the idea of an Indian restaurant that appeals to a non-ethnic clientele.

   That said, the food at Benares veered between mediocre and so-so. A shami kabab starter was under-salted (perhaps a concession to local tastes) but it was also a bad shami kabab, the sort of dish which would have got a sous chef fired at an Indian hotel. A trio of scallops was moderately successful and not a patch on the imaginative scallops at Amaya.

   Main courses were failures. A south Indian style duck in which slices of the duck were arranged on a Chettinad-type gravy did not work because the duck was over-cooked. The resulting dish was neither Indian nor Western. A plate of three large prawns tasted of nothing as much as styrofoam and an attempt to mix a mangsho-type Bengali mutton dish with a base of Calcutta-style channa flopped because the channa tasted so Punjabi that it overpowered the meat. A ‘Hyderabadi’ biryani was unobjectionable enough, the sort of biryani you would get at a coffee shop in an Indian hotel made by a chef who had done three years of catering college.

   There were no breakthroughs here. There was no great innovation. No risks were taken with the food. This was just mediocre Indian cuisine.

   I think I will have to disagree with Namita about London being the capital of Indian cuisine. This may have been true some years ago. But now Indian restaurants in India beat the hell out of anything in London. Forget Bukhara or Dum Pukht – I doubt if many of these London chefs would be allowed to cook in those kitchens – but even the Masala restaurants of the Taj group are immeasurably superior to Benares. And by the time you get to Varq or Indian Accent, the contrast is so great as to be meaningless.

   I mean no disrespect to the Indian chefs in London. They cater essentially to people who know nothing about Indian food and who believe that if spice levels are reduced or if the gravy is placed below the meat, this marks a huge advance in Indian cuisine. Which is fine and what’s more, it seems to work. They get Michelin stars and the likes of Atul Kochhar and Alfred Prasad of Tamarind are media stars. As an Indian I am proud of their achievements.

   I’m just glad that I don’t have to eat their food.

Day six: My final day in London. I spent most of it at the Henry VIII exhibition at the British Library. I only had time for a quick lunch at Bordeaux, the hotel’s casual dining restaurant.

   On the way back I switched to Jet Airways and was glad I did. Jet must have the best First Class on this sector. The beds are comfortable, you can shut the shutters and turn your seat into a cabin, the TV screens are enormous, the wines are first-rate and the service is so warm and welcoming that you wonder why Indians even bother with foreign airlines.

   Our private airlines may be in trouble but there’s one thing you’ve got to concede. They have erased memories of Air India’s sloppiness and have proved that given the right opportunity, Indians can run airlines that are easily as good as the much-praised carriers of south east Asia.

   And the Indian food was much better than anything I ate in London.

(Image attributed to Wikimedia Commons)