Blanchette, 9 D'Arblay Street, London W1 (020 7439 8100). Meal for two, including wine and service, £50-£80

I tried to keep with the project, really I did. I told myself it would be fine, that this was what I was paid to do. By the morning of the lunch, however, I knew I couldn't live a lie any more. I didn't want to eat at the place I had booked. I won't name it. It wouldn't be fair to diss a restaurant I never even visited. But I have to say that the whole proposition looked like as much fun as root-canal surgery without the anaesthetic. The booking process had been terrifying enough. They didn't just demand an email address. They wanted a credit-card number, too. Why didn't they go the whole hog and ask me to pop over so they could snap an electronic tag on my ankle?

Then there was the food: I was told I would be presented with a list of 16 dishes from which I was to assemble a tasting menu. It was obvious. At some point during the meal a waiter would tell me they had "a concept". The whole table had to have the same dishes. So to try enough, we'd have to go for at least seven courses. Oh God. Tasting menus. If I'm given a menu, I really don't want to taste it. I want to eat it. I want to get armpit-deep in the sauce. Tasting menus are to the pleasures of food what IVF is to the pleasures of sex. And I should know. I've been through both.

I've come to hate tasting menus. Yes, I know, that we should all have these problems. Ooh my diamond slippers are pinching and all that. But really! Hell is being pelted with itsy-bitsy food doodles, the culinary equivalent of a Fisher-Price activity centre for grown-ups: sniff that, suck on this, lick the other, shiny, shiny, shiny. If something you actually like turns up, there's never enough of it. The damn thing has gone before you've registered it was there. And you have to be reverent and sombre and serious because it's all about the bloody chef locating the wellspring of their creativity. Well, I know what I'd like to do with their wellspring.

So that morning I phoned them up and cancelled my table. When would you like to rebook, the woman at the other end said. How about never? How's never for you?

Instead I booked a table at Blanchette, which friends had said I would like very much, and they were right. Blanchette is intensely likable. It's an utterly French place in the north end of London's Soho run by three utterly French brothers called Maxime, Yannis and Malik. At the front there's a bar to eat at with a view of French pastoral scenes assembled from Art Nouveau tiles. At the back there's a dining room with bare-brick walls that aren't so much distressed as completely ravaged, an experience for which they are probably undergoing counselling.

A soundtrack of Serge Gainsbourg plays as though he's gone through his kitsch phase and come out into the sunny uplands of cultural respectability. He hasn't – Serge is still a whole dairy's worth of overripe cheese. But do you want to be the one to tell Maxime, Yannis and Malik? No, me neither.

What the brothers do, they do lovingly. They will not ask for your email address or your credit-card number. They don't want to send you a Christmas card. They just want to feed you. Blanchette is not a hassle. For that alone I love them. The menu is split between selections of cheese with brilliant names like Tomme d'Abondance, various charcuterie – coppa, truffled saucisson, snacks and small plates. There is a glorious old-school vibe.

Crisp deep-fried frogs' legs, to be stripped in one go from the bone with your teeth, come with a sprightly bois boudran sauce of white-wine vinegar, chopped tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, fresh green herbs and Tabasco, which probably hasn't been seen outside the dining room of Le Gavroche since the 1970s. It's just the thing to make deep-fried frogs' legs feel healthy.

There are hot, salty, cheese-dusted gougères with liquid, cheesy centres alongside sweet-sour confited onions. There are slices of pissaladière with more confited onions, buttery puff pastry and a generous scattering of salted anchovies. There are slices of deep-fried pigs' ears, which aren't quite as satisfying as other deep-fried bits of pig, but will more than do. These plates cost three or four quid each.

From the small plates came a good-sized round of dark braised lamb shoulder studded with rosemary and anchovy and lying in a slick of a big oniony soubise sauce. Another dish arrives containing a deep puddle of lentils braised in sticky brown chicken jus and scattered with crisp shards of duck-confit skin. It was a superb base, just not for the piece of confit salmon that lay on top of it. Great fish, cooked very precisely, and brilliant lentils. They just didn't hit it off. No matter: at between £6 and £8 a dish it's hard to resent the missteps.

Honour is saved by a truly lovely salad of leeks vinaigrette with lots of frisée and pickled wild mushrooms. Another board brings three big fat asparagus with curls of salty Comté cheese and some slightly redundant rounds of crêpe filled with cream cheese. Of the desserts an olive oil and sauternes cake is a little overegged. Much better is a passion-fruit vacherin, of cream and meringue and zest and kick.

Unsurprisingly the wine list has been written with a complete understanding that nowhere outside la Belle France has ever even thought of making wine. It is a hymn to the Loire, Languedoc, Rhône and all points in between, in roughly 40 bottles. Pricing starts off modestly before getting a little breathless very quickly, but there is a reasonable choice by the carafe and the glass.

The problem is that real life will intervene. At the end of the meal I looked at my phone, only to see that I had been called by the very restaurant I had cancelled at 10.04am. There was a message. Where was I? Please call immediately. Brilliant. The waitress hadn't bothered to note the cancellation. The restaurant I didn't want to visit because it seemed a total pain in the arse had managed to be a total pain in the arse without me even going there. Which was when I was certain: with Blanchette I'd made exactly the right choice.

Jay's news bites

■ For more top charcuterie and cheese action, head to Friends of Ham by the station in Leeds. The meat selection goes beyond the usual French and Italian suspects to various bits of pig cured at the Reliance (the-reliance.co.uk), a pub in the city that has made a splash with its own product made using rare-breed pork. Friends of Ham also has a serious drinks list guaranteed to thrill even the most intense of beer geeks (friendsofham.com)

■ The chocolatier Paul A Young has become the first in Europe to produce a "whole bean" chocolate bar, using a mixture of beans from Madagascar. Instead of being shelled they are granite ground and mixed with unrefined demerara sugar. Available in 73% and 64% cocoa solids (paulayoung.co.uk)

■ Earlier this year I wrote disobligingly about Sizzle and Grill, a grim Cardiff restaurant which promotes a Man vs Food competitive-eating menu. This month, the owner, Paul Stevens, pleaded guilty to 18 public hygiene offences (plus two counts of benefit fraud). It seems you risked making yourself sick by eating there even if you didn't order the 69oz mixed grill.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1