Prepare your taste buds for an unforgettable culinary experience at The Pelican, London! You won’t believe the extraordinary gastronomic wonders waiting for you – check out this jaw-dropping review!

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I have to admit I wasn’t expecting any pyro from The Pelican. A gastropub in Notting Hill isn’t usually the sort of thing I’d drive across town for, but I was meeting my daughter for lunch and it was conveniently located for her between the halls and campus.

She’s studying design engineering, so it’s getting a lot more interesting to have lunch with her than the average 20-year-old. When we first sat down in the functional brown Victorian pub that houses The Pelican, she was lending my ear to design theory. Something about how you should design an object, structure or process perfectly and then reduce it to the last point before failure, ensuring the lowest cost and maximum functionality. I usually find conversations like this compelling, but my mind, I confess, was drifting towards the structure of the building we were sitting in. Massive. Over-mirror. No doubt designed to last an eternity and studded with inexplicable plaster decorations. Form can follow function as much as it likes, but you gotta love an egg and dart frame.

The menu was short and typed, with lots of short words, like ‘oysters’, ‘beetroot’ and ‘Barnsley chop’ and then a refreshingly large amount of white space. I imagined, initially, that this was an echo of the cool aesthetic of, shall we say, Saint John or Hereford Rd, but found it to be more functional than that when the waitress came over and wrote the day’s specials in the blank. That was nice. A little “extra” service. Pointless, really, when everything was written on a mirror on the opposite wall, but a phenomenal opportunity to talk about food and get excited about the contact.

I mean that as a compliment, but there was nothing new on the menu. Each dish was a trusted favorite of the modern British canon, and they weren’t trying to bring anything up to date with twists, gimmicks or other surprises. They just send someone to tell you how damn good this is. Simple, elegant and effective.

The scampi, our waitress said, had just been “shown grilled” and she wasn’t kidding. About 95% of the flavor comes when the chitin in the shell is burned off. The smell of a charcoal grill on a Hebridean beach. What’s inside is sashimi with a pleasant sweetness. You can only do this with the best and most expensive langos, and even then, you need to be careful, skilled, and confident enough to keep things simple. They succeeded.

Mince on toast has become trendy. It’s a retro relic that will never match what my mother used to cook us, where the cheap stuff the butcher minced from her leftovers was spiced up with Bovril. Here, the waitress explained, they buy a cow every fortnight, serve the big pieces, and then cook the minced mince in a strong demi-glace they made from the bones. They don’t “have to” do it (my mom could teach them some shortcuts) but the result is sublime. It has a kind of conceptual weight.

It is the distillation of a process that begins with an entire animal and a group of talented and caring people. All of this – ingredients, labor, time, care, integrity – on toast.

There aren’t enough butterhead lettuces anymore. Big, swollen, open lettuces don’t pack well and don’t survive on supermarket shelves, but they epitomize an English summer picnic. The soft leaves need nothing more than a good English mustard-based vinaigrette. Here they disassemble the lettuce and then reassemble it in a large, flat bowl, similar to a giant puffed peony, and spray a phosphorescent grease on it. I think it might be the best seduction food I’ve ever come across. You need to get in with your hands, folding each leaf into a neat package and posting it past your lips. What’s wrong with these guys? Everything has a kind of extra spin, a final polish that makes it shine.

The onglet comes with peppercorn sauce, which would be textbook if it weren’t for the unusually pungent peppercorns they chose, and that demi-glace properly rendered. Lemon sole with brown butter would be completely standard operating procedure if it weren’t grilled on a thin metal griddle, so even the slightly greasy white skin on the underside of the fish is crispy and golden brown. Triple-cooked fries are now everyday, unless they come with freshly made aioli with roasted garlic.

Two days before our lunch, I had eaten at an upscale restaurant chain, and it had been one of the most draining experiences of my life. Not bad individually. Nothing you could report as awful. But I realized as I sat there, sucking down some mediocre stock, that every component had been expertly pared down as a modern, efficient design. The ingredients, the service, the room. All calculated with microscopic tolerances so as not to alienate a medium-low discerning customer. A design imperative to protect profit, with any pleasure goal entirely subordinate. I know these are tough times, but I felt like Winston Smith by the end 1984. Worn out, broken by the screeching shit. The terrible inevitability of it. All hope is dead. I felt like him, like crying into my gray meal.

So it would appear The Pelican is scarily designed, by my daughter’s standards. They build everything better than strictly necessary. There are modest “decorations” to the dishes and there is no apparent logic beyond creating happiness. They could have designed the restaurant experience to be non-crappy enough that customers wouldn’t stay away. Instead, they made it so good that people like me can’t forget them and will gladly come back, again and again. Thank God The Pelican got it so wrong.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and send him an email at tim.hayward@ft.com

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