Quite suddenly, and for no immediately obvious reason, we find ourselves assailed by nostalgia for the postwar era. David Kynaston's Austerity Britain 1945-51 has just been published to uniform raves, while Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain opened on BBC2 with a brilliantly cogent account of the same years. After decades of respectful froideur, the country has fallen madly in love with that unflinching emblem of postwar stoicism, the Queen, while we are finally poised to swap a gleamingly modernist PM for a man who always appears in the mind's eye in the dull monochrome of Sir Stafford Cripps. We have even reverted to switching off the lights to conserve energy.

As for the restaurant industry, though it would be stretching things to discern a towering tide of austerity, it becomes clearer by the week that the opulence and pretension of recent years is yielding to simplicity, even a dash of thrift. Our two top kitchen boys, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay, have opened pubs serving ultra-traditional food wildly in contrast to their fancy-dan Michelin stuff, and the march of cheap and previously dishonoured cuts of meat under what is known throughout culinary academia as the Dick Emery Principle ("Ooh, you are offal but...") seems irresistible.

The cleverly named 32 Great Queen Street is a paradigm of the shift in emphasis. A joint project between the chef and food writer Tom Norrington-Davies and partners in two of our more feted gastropubs (the Eagle and the Anchor & Hope), there is a lack of pomp verging on starkness here that appealed even before the first dish arrived.

When I say it appealed immediately, I am in fact lying. The truth is that the minuteness of our bare, napery-bereft wooden table - a squeeze for one skinnifer, let alone two fattipuffs - irritated the hell out of us. "I mean, it's not as if we're small men, " muttered my friend as a request for something larger was denied. "We're portly men, and we need space." For 15 minutes we seethed, taking umbrage at everything from Lilliputian water glasses (presumably designed to make the table seem bigger) to the genteel shabbiness of the room (unencumbered aubergine walls deliberately scuffed up, cheap repro antique light fittings, yellow ceilings adorned with the odd bit of cornicing).

Then the food started coming, and a succession of reasonably priced, splendidly simple and beautifully cooked dishes acted on our strop like Jeeves's raw egg and Worcestershire sauce pick-me-ups on a Bertie Wooster hangover. Crab on toast was superb, a mound of white and dark meat coming suffused in a strong, gutsy sauce, but better still was a shiny, vibrantly fresh-tasting crescent of smoked mackerel served with lightly pickled cucumber and homemade horseradish cream. "And the really nice thing about that," said my friend, who'd been moaning about the no smoking rule, "is that the fish is so well smoked, it's worth about 20 Silk Cuts."

Any residual irritation at the continuing vacancy of a nearby table for four was dispelled by the splendour of the main courses. My roast Welsh lamb, in several thick and juicy pink slices, had the correct, faintly fatty flavour of well-fed young ovine, and came with puréed broad bean deliciously laced with garlic and capers. My friend's roast rump, served with potato salad and watercress, tasted as good as it was aesthetically pleasing (there is no colour across the entire food spectrum half as alluring as the deep ruby red of rare beef). Chips were fat, brown and perfect. Puddings, especially a rampant strawberry tart, were excellent, too.

All right, perhaps on reflection this wasn't a meal notable for austerity. But in spirit (if not, thankfully, in execution) it paid tribute to a time long before truffle oil, aubergine caviar and the substitution of gravy with jus, and spoke eloquently for a new generation of cooks who've bleedin' had it with the inferiority complex-born, Franco-eclectic poncery that has plagued restaurant food for so long. Had he saved up the five years' worth of ration books for such a lunch, dear old Clement Attlee would have loved it, and higher praise than that there cannot be.

Rating 9/10
Telephone 020-7242 0622
Address 32 Great Queen Street, London WC2.
Open Lunch, Tues-Sat, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-11pm.
Price Meal for two with wine, coffee and service, around £60