Restaurant review, The Crooked Well, 16 Grove Lane, London.

There's been a lot of nonsense talked already about The Crooked Well. The spectacle of a middle-class restaurant opening in apparently hard-as-nails Camberwell – a gastropub (gasp!) run by a chap called Hector (shriek!) whose website brazenly mentions that he worked in a French nightclub during his gap-year (snigger!) and whose partner is a double-barrelled posho called Matt whose career began in Tunbridge Wells (stop! Stop!) – is being greeted as if Heston Blumenthal had opened a restaurant in Wormwood Scrubs.

For heaven's sake. Camberwell has always leaned towards, if not gentility, then class-neutrality. It occupies a no-man's-land between Brixton and Dulwich, constantly pulled between the edgy and the bourgeois, somehow maintaining equilibrium. When I lived there, my neighbours were journalists and advertising types. Florence Welch, of the Machine, grew up in my road. Ten years earlier, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Terry Jones of the Monty Pythons all lived in Camberwell Grove (though, sadly, not together). It was hardly an upscale neighbourhood, but it wasn't conspicuously grotty. And before The Crooked Well was on this site, a bar called The Parisien managed to hold its own against the, you know, marauding street hooligans, and served perfectly acceptable steaks.

Angie and I arrived at 8.30pm on a freezing Tuesday evening, looking for comfort and, more to the point, comfort food. From outside, The Well is a rather cheerless-looking place with uncurtained windows. Inside, stage left, there's a drinking-and-chatting section, then a bar, then, stage right, a more formal dining area. You wouldn't call it a warm place. Beneath a wall of exposed brickwork was a fireplace, with five candles (rather than logs and coal) burning in it. The radiator beside our table was set to Tepid. The lights were set to Dim/Gloomy. Unclothed Formica tables and wooden chairs creaked on wooden floorboards. More uncurtained windows disclosed the spectacle of frozen Camberwellians struggling home to their two-bar electric fires. I was afraid my frozen fiancée would start to weep.

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