Very few restaurants in Britain are absolutely the best in their class, without question. Asked by porky bores at parties which restaurant I consider to be the best Italian, French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Vietnamese, British or, God help us, Mexican restaurant in the country,

I wearily serve up my random answer du jour (“Locatelli, Gavroche, Defune, Sojo, Barrafina, Retsina, Cay Tre, Bull & Last, don’t know, don’t care, not a fan of refried beans…”) and then patiently wait to hear their tedious assertion that such and such another perfectly okay restaurant is in fact in better form just now, and what do I think about that?

I think nothing. It’s a matter of taste. Go, eat, shut up. I’m trying to get drunk here. There is only one restaurant in town that is without question and unanimously the best of its kind, and that is Al Waha. No other Lebanese comes close.

Lebanese is the mother-ship cuisine. The alpha and bettispaghetti of cuisines. It contains all the flavours of the dawn of civilisation, all our gastronomic race memories, the first food, the cooked-in aromas of the very oven in which our mouthlife was forged: smashed chickpeas bound in oil, raw lamb, salty cheese in hot pastry, piles of chopped parsley, lentils and broad beans and pine nuts a thousand ways, yoghurt, pickled things, coffee flavoured with magical seedpods… it’s Ali Baba and the Forty Courses. It’s what men sat down and ate to celebrate the end of the Stone Age. There are other Arab cuisines, but even Egyptians and Syrians will admit they are variations on a theme. There are some North African flavours that are as biblical in taste and texture – but there’s only so much couscous you can eat. Lebanese stands alone.

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This is how eating in a great restaurant used to taste, and will again, for ten days only

Giles Coren

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And it doesn’t really translate to restaurants. Ask a Lebanese person where is good to go for Lebanese food and they will usually say, “My mother’s house,” and invite you there. However good a restaurant is, they will tell you, it is a different proposition altogether from the real thing. If you explain that what you really want to do is go to a restaurant, and you want to know where they would go, they will say, “I’d go for a Chinese.”

And if you press them again, they will say Al Waha. And so will any restaurant critic, food writer, chef, grocer or postman with half an ounce of common sense. I reviewed it years ago for The Independent (which no doubt briefly filled the place with leprous social workers and schoolteachers sharing a radish between four and fighting over the free bread) and I eat there as often as I can. But still I want somewhere new. I reviewed Fakhreldine in Piccadilly when it relaunched in 2003 but it was pretty dreadful. I quite liked Levantine in Paddington and admired that new Lebanese-on-the-go joint, Comptoir Libanais; I’ll eat the odd Maroush kebab but that ain’t no thang… So, where?

I bumped into the legendary Lebanese foodie, Anissa Helou, a couple of times over the summer and asked her where I could go for good Lebanese food, and she immediately invited me round to her place, which was lovely of her, but, no, I meant a restaurant.

She said there was only really Al Waha. Which I knew. And then she said, “You could try Chez Marcelle in Olympia, if she’s still there. It’s only a café. Very small. I haven’t been there in years, but the cooking was always extremely good. I’ll call and see if she’s around.”

She was. So we went. And there was Marcelle herself, more or less on her own, taking the orders and nattering in Arabic with the regulars, cooking everything from fresh out back (often right from the start, peeling, chopping, mixing, baking to order) and bringing it to the tables, with only one wee Eastern European chap to help.

Beaming, encouraging, cajoling, Marcelle, who took our order, made heavy work for herself in the kitchen, taking down nine or ten dishes and hustling off to prepare them. Then came more regulars, and out she came to chat, and back, and out again. We ordered some wine; they didn’t have it, which was a shame because it was a white Château Musar I didn’t know existed. Maybe it doesn’t.

The atmosphere is strangely Middle Eastern in that the place is blatantly a café – uncovered tables, erratic service, empty tables left half-cleared, the business almost exclusively walk-ins – but the whole thing takes for ever. We were there for the best part of two and a half hours.

But the food was brilliant. Just brilliant. Surely as close to the fabled domestic repertoire as you will see in a squat-and-gobble just off the Shepherds Bush roundabout, or anywhere else in London for that matter.

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