Well, this is certainly different. The strobes, lasers and dry ice, the glitter balls, UV lights and sound system – playing everything from Roxette to The Prodigy via Vivaldi – that could give Fabric a run for its money. Oh, and Björn, our utterly lovely, luxuriantly tressed Iggy Pop lookalike waiter, who ends the night clad only in a pair of tropical-print swimming trunks. Part restaurant, part rave (minus the dancing), Punk Royale is a headily intoxicating mix of glee and gastronomy, hedonism and haute cuisine, camp, vaudeville and caviar.

A nondescript black door off Sackville Street leads to a dim, assuredly lo-fi room, the walls decorated with pop-art pictures of Bertie Bassett and Marco Pierre White. There are two sittings most nights, and dinner is £220 a head for 24 courses, including lots and lots of excellent booze. You’re met by Kat, the sterling maître d’, with a huge dirty martini, before being shown your table, where phones are locked away until the end of dinner. Hooray!

Now, anything remotely ‘interactive’ is my idea of hell, the appeal of forced jollity sitting somewhere between the noose and the guillotine. I’m also bored by the relentless tyranny of the tasting menu and so Punk Royale (which started in Stockholm) should be nothing short of excruciating. But it’s not. Their tongue is wedged so firmly in cheek, the service so exuberant, the atmosphere so giddily voluptuous that one cannot help but fall in love. surprising still, the food is superb.

You start at the pass, with a huge wodge of caviar dumped on the back of your hand, to be devoured with a shot of frozen vodka, before succumbing to an onslaught of courses that mix and match cuisine and technique with merry aplomb: a delicately wobbling chawanmushi (Japanese egg custard) topped with the most intense chicken sauce, a tiny blood waffle topped with smoked eel. One course is fed to you (an exquisite piece of lobster), another you’re instructed to lick from the plate (a Pollock-esque mess of creamy Danish remoulade).

Punk Royale may not be to all tastes (first dates and maiden aunts beware), but I haven’t had so much fun for years. It’s a place with a joyous disregard for the bourgeoise niceties of ‘feen deening’, an exhilarating, bonkers blast from start to merry end.

£220 per head, with or without alcohol. 6 Sackville Street, London W1; punkroyale.com

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