How do you like your steak? I don’t mean rare, medium or ruined, I mean what kind of ambience do you want?  The university educated, job in the media, parents in the shires, style of Hawksmoor, or the school of hard knocks, what bloody parents, making a fortune at the bank, style of STK?

It’s very City inside – J and I being the only people in the restaurant not wearing ties. Downstairs is a busy bar while upstairs there’s a la carte on offer. It’s a bit of a climb up there as the lift only takes one person – presumably it was designed by the same people who make the escape pods for Bond villains.

‘Eating doesn’t get Greek-er than this!’, as John Torode and Gregg Wallace might proclaim. But does the restaurant live up to its self-inflicted hyperbole? Having spent a childhood’s-worth of holidays clattering around on donkeys, picking fresh almonds and flitting round olive groves, I’m a soppy old nostalgic already poised for persuasion. 

The Tavern is miraculously free of cartoon chefs. Instead, it has a bevy of friendly, burly and rather dashing gentlemen, who whizz around the open plan kitchen with a general air of passion and competence like sexy, chefly bumblebees.

I like to wrestle with a steak, shirts off like William Shatner in Star Trek, the hard-won bits are where the flavour is and that’s why onglet is so good. Flatiron’s steak is butter smooth, you could cut it with an airline spork, but they do a pretty good job of getting some texture and caramelisation on the outside, so saving it from being anodyne.

The Macdonald Townhouse Hotel sits on the corner of Portland and Princess Street; tall and elegant with the kind of soaring gothic windows that suggests an architect with pious leanings, the Macdonald is the understated antithesis of those 21st century hotel blocks that resemble a giant Rubik’s cube.

Town-Topic in Kansas’s menu remains dedicated to its burger output, offering single, double and triple hamburgers, alongside a ½ lb for fat bastards who can’t get their carnivorous kicks from a triple. 

They already have it good in Primrose Hill in their lovely ivory postcode, that they should also have such an excellent, well-priced, bistro is just another small injustice that life likes to challenge me with. Returning to Sarf Lundun and its grunting monsters, I felt that Absinthe had at least made my heart grow a little bit fonder.

Attempts to de-pubify the place have involved hanging jamons in the window like meaty Christmas decorations. This presumably in homage to the average tapas bar in Spain, where chunky legs hang over your head sweating gently into their cups. Rather like the clients.