Restaurant review, Massimo Restaurant and Oyster Bar, London.

It happens sometimes in a foreign city. You leave the tawdry, neon-lit sprawl of the main drag and wander down an unpromising side street, only to stumble across The Perfect Restaurant – golden and gorgeous and oozing relaxation and low-key glamour. Emerging hours later, as though from a dream, you forget to note the name of the restaurant or the street, and when you return, you never manage to find it again.

Weirdly, given that I'm meant to know all about new restaurants, a version of this happened to me in my home city the other week. A friend invited me for dinner at a new hotel I'd never heard of, The Corinthia, which opened earlier this year on Northumberland Avenue, a street off Trafalgar Square that appears on the Monopoly board but otherwise doesn't feature very largely in London life.

We had a perfectly OK meal, in an expensively bland, modern British restaurant. And then we set off to explore the rest of the hotel. Creeping down marbled corridors, past shadowy cocktail bars, we arrived at a discreet, unmarked door. 'Ah, this must be Massimo – let's look!' said my friend, and I agreed, though I had no idea what Massimo might be.

We pushed open the door, and by God, there it was – the Dream Restaurant. A vast, elegant, Deco-ish brasserie, a sepia-tinted tableau of steam-age glamour, with its own lost tribe of interesting, arty-looking customers. Acres of conker-coloured leather banquettes stretched into the distance. Huge, hemispherical light fittings set the mosaic marble floor twinkling, and a parade of candy-striped Corinthian columns lent the room a fantastical, cartoonish dimension, like the Wolseley reimagined by Dr Seuss.

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