But you would be wrong to do thusly.You see, The Rising Sun has pretensions to be a restaurant. And not just the sort of restaurant that serves a glass of orange juice as a starter – a serious restaurant. So there are formal waiters wearing black, bearing B&H on silver salvers The beautiful flowers are formally arranged I would guess the inspiration was "wedding" But the end result is more "funeral". Which doesn't create quite the required ambience.Nor does waiting an hour for a table Not because the staff were especially busy. But because they were 10 minutes folding our napkins, 10 minutes finding our cruet set, and 10 minutes tracking down our wine. Which gave me the time to note that the barmaid had lemon, lime and orange slices available for garnish.

But, to her credit, she was decent enough to get the pepper grinder from the kitchen to season my Bloody Mary.I don't mean to appear condescending, but there was something very Hyacinth Bucket about The Rising Sun. The sauces on the menu were all either "encircling" or "enrobing" At the very least they were "complimenting". Sauces around these parts do not, evidently, just hang about and twiddle their thumbs. When I asked for details of the "Todman" sauce that encircled "Mr Walker's Thai Fish Cake", nobody knew. Apart from "Mr Walker got it abroad".The food arrived on platters – not plates. Platters that were, in most cases, the same shape as the food we were eating Which was nice.

They were borne by waitresses who had been to an outdated school of restauranting They even had an angle of approach Like there were chalk footprints on the carpet to follow The platters were then laid at a pre-determined angle. As she laid down my starter, she whispered "I had better turn it round, or I'll get into trouble."Portions were huge. My natural smoked haddock rarebit on sweet tomato with basil dressing could have fed the entire room. Coincidentally, that morning I had been reading about the furore surrounding America's Fattest City. The good people of Houston, Texas were up in arms – admittedly arms with very flappy skin – about the quality of food in their city They declared their obesity was due to all the good food. Like there's no good food to be had in Paris? Or in London?Anyway, gluttons no longer gorge themselves; they are simply suffering from an "eating disorder" Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease And I am more diseased than most But my smoked haddock was badly overcooked. And I couldn't offload it on anyone else because they had their own starters to deal with.