Restaurant review The Delaunay, 55 Aldwych, London.

Simply walking into the Delaunay makes you feel you've found the perfect restaurant. Sited on the corner of Aldwych and Drury Lane, it hums with elegance. The rubicund doorman tips his top hat, a startlingly pretty Roedean-head-girl takes your coat and you enter a wide, welcoming, marble-floored space. To your right, a vast bar is lit up like a cathedral high altar; to your left is a line of tables for posers, chatterers, couples nursing cocktails. Riding on castors is a glass-topped trolley full of teatime cakes – millefeuille, Black Forest gâteau, sachertorte – in case someone fancies a sugar rush at 9pm. Beyond the grey pillars, you make out the dark, indefinably sexy interior where the serious eating goes on. Mein Gott, you think, das ist wunderbar.

Because you're looking here at a dream of Mitteleuropa sometime in the 1930s before it all went to rubble. A little bit Cabaret, a touch Habsburg dining-room, a soupçon Paris boulevard (check out the French antique clock, its face a distressed orange like a 1940s duchess) and a lot Viennese café.

The Delaunay's owners, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, the nation's most polished and enterprising restaurateurs, have looked for inspiration to the grand cafés of Old Europe, as they did when launching The Wolseley in 2003. They were, effectively, turning their back on chef-led cuisine and returning to the cooking relished by our grandparents: English-French dishes with added Danube flavours: coq au vin and kedgeree, but with added choucroute a l'Alsacienne.

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