Kensington Church Street, W8; 020 7221 9225. Lunch, Mon-Fri, 12.30pm-2pm; Sat, noon-2.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30pm-10pm

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Lot of death about at the moment. Two Keiths: Waterhouse and Floyd; the acceptable and unacceptable faces of lunch. I lunched with both of them: Floyd just the once, Waterhouse quite often. They were about as different as humans could be. Waterhouse was witty, enthusiastic, informed, eloquent, full of scandal and anecdote, flights of fancy and hoots of laughter. And Floyd wasn’t. They did, though, have two things in common: a love of lunch, and not eating lunch. Waterhouse would take elaborate care over ordering, ask the waitress how the scallops were, if the chops were from Barnsley, always three courses and cheese. It would come with side dishes, one after the other. And he’d regard each plate with a watery eye of a roué examining postcards of cancan girls. They would be removed, appreciated, sighed over, but unravished, and he would mutter a heartfelt “lovely” or “delicious” to the waitress. He might have meant the waitress. He would always order bottles in pairs: one on the table, one in the bucket. He had a horror at even the hint of vinous drought. Floyd didn’t eat, either; mainly because he was comatose, and, anyway, what he’d cooked was inedible.

So I’ve been thinking about lunch a lot. I’ve never really been a luncher. I don’t seek out lunches. It’s not the food; it’s the people. There are people who lunch, and those who don’t. Ladies who lunch have had Sondheim songs written for them. It’s the men who lunch that are a problem. Midday blokes at trough are not a good look. Greasy, scratch’n’sniff suits, meaty faces, potato-fisted, gravy-mouthed, guffawing and stabbing and quaffing. It’s really not me. All the words that go with those spinnaker-stomached, suety men make me shudder: ­trencherman; bon viveur; bibulous; gourmand; clubbable; and the appellation of social and sexual death, “the life and soul”.

Of all the social, theological and traditional interdictions, etiquettes, superstitions and prejudices, none is more onerously depressing, dispiriting and fundamentally, inhospitably inhuman than the separation of the sexes over food. I’m old enough to remember English county tables’ nod to Islam, when, at the end of dinner, the hostess would rise and, with a brittle jollity, say, “Well, ladies, shall we leave the men to their port?” and they’d shuffle off, taking what lightness and jollity there was with them. And we men would slump and talk dissolutely about shooting and motor cars, and that disgusting amuse-bouche, cunnilingus, and childishly play “pass the decanter”, like a four-year-old’s birthday game.

When men eat together, they become very, very male. Not in a manly, Gawainish, lumberjack sense, but in a blokey, wallowing-buffalo, flatulent-hippo, bad-tempered-Greek-calamari-molester-in-apple-catcher-undercrackers-sitting-on-white-plastic-furniture-flexing-furry-shoulders sort of way. Now some men love this. They look at the distaff world of culture and civilisation, emotion and outdoors as an amusing distraction from the real core of life with a willy, which is to tuck a napkin under all your chins, chew cow, suck claret, and regard, with adoring oyster eyes, other men. I can’t do it. God, I’ve tried. I’ve cultivated a voice like a Magimix full of wet gravel. I’ve tried to laugh like a gibbon at Covent Garden. I’ve tried rearranging my bollocks with an exhibitionist panache. I’ve plagiarised opinions on Frogeye Sprites, the amalgamation of county regiments, corporal punishment as both chastisement and foreplay, the 3.30 at Haydock Park, and the bloody fantastic little brothel outside Bergerac. I’ve really tried to corral anecdotes without a narrative arc about men called Pongo and Felcher Jock that involve foreskins caught in other people’s zips, storming pillboxes with a Sten and a tin leg, a left and a right at owls, but without conviction or success. I’m not fooling anyone, except the odd gay Italian.

I’ve been reconsidering lunch. I haven’t got so many meals left to me that I can go discarding them willy-nilly, for no better reason than I might do some more work. I know that when I’m on my deathbed, clutching the counterpane and wheezing, my great regret won’t be that I didn’t compose more smug, sarky aperçus, but I might just regret not having had more lunches. The quick bite, the long, dissipated afternoon that seeps into tea and dinner. Standing at bars, reclining on pillows, sitting on terraces and in booths, eating the card or glutting on a single ingredient. Oysters and gulls’ eggs. Woodcock and first-run salmon. Asparagus and rhubarb. The seasonal lunches of game, and paschal lamb; of Michaelmas goose, and of steamed puddings. I always feel that the year really starts in September: the beginning of shooting, back to school, tweed and russet apples. My autumnal new-year resolution is to sit down to more lunches, but almost all of them will be with women. In fact, I’m off right now to lunch an old girlfriend. Ex lunches are the most poignant and pleasurable. All the frisson, the camaraderie, the lingering, without the recriminations, the mess and the nagging.

I always forget about Clarke’s. Somehow, its undoubted accomplishments slide through my favourites list. Sally Clarke has been running her shop and restaurant for years. She was the woman chef when the only women working in restaurants were carrying plates or turning tricks at the bar. The Blonde goes to her expensive boutique shop three or four times a week. She says the sausage rolls are deathly good, the pies a slice of heaven, and the cheese of pristine quality. It’s impulse-grazing, boutique food. The restaurant’s USP is not having a USP. Or, indeed, a menu. You eat what Sally’s brigade cooks, which is wholesome, up to a point, but it’s what I get at home. I sort of want a choice if I’m paying to sit down. I knew someone who ate there one night and was taken there on a date the next. She gently asked if she could perhaps have something different this time. No, was the politely curt reply.

But now Clarke’s, after years of Calvinistic certainty, has added a short à la carte. So I went back. The Blonde and I took Dave Macmillan and Bella Pollen, and Minna Fry, who’s a publisher at HarperCollins. It was all very bookish. In appreciation of this bluestocking line-up, we were put in the basement, which is just as I remember it: an uncompromising basement. They have done nothing to soften or obscure its blank, storage purpose. There is a commendable absence of folderol, but it’s not that pleasant or welcoming. The chairs are contrarily the ones that pubs with aspirations put in their gardens. They are arse-achingly uncomfortable. Sally’s choice is sniffily segregated on the front of the à la carte menu. It looked rather good, but I can’t for the life remember what it was.

I led off with a beetroot soup, which wasn’t borscht. It tasted loud, loud and insistent. Each mouthful shouted the same exclamation, like an orange madman at a bus stop. In truth, if it hadn’t said beetroot on the card, I’d have had no idea that was what it was made with. And then vitello tonnato, which was made with neither veal nor tuna, but pork and anchovy, which is a bit like ordering Marcello Mastroianni and Gina Lollobrigida, and getting Ray Winstone and Kelly Brook: thin, chilly, labial folds of pig doused in knickerish mayonnaise. The pig was pink, the anchovies coarse, without being demanding; together, they worked up to a point, but only reminded me how much I like the veal and tuna. It had the same problem as the soup: one bold taste that never progressed, like chewing John Cage.

Bella had a bean salad that was so righteously dull I wondered what it had been, and another starter, a smoked-salmon risotto; I really can’t warm to hot smoked salmon. But there was a well-made treacle tart for pudding. The trouble here is the food is prim and well educated; it has perfect manners and a commendable self-possession. It just doesn’t particularly care if you like it or not. It’s too well brought up to be ingratiating or remotely flirtatious, and it draws the line at having fun with strangers. The Blonde leant across and said: “Look, dear, dinner’s just not that into you.”

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