Le Jardin de Joel Robuchon

A couple of weeks ago, I took my family off to the outrageously priced Jardin de Joel Robuchon in the Landmark building in Central on Hong Kong Island. It was a decision made with eyes wide open in celebration of a landmark anniversary on the part of my long-suffering better half and a windfall bonus on my own behalf – just reward for catapulting the company's annual report to a podium finish in the Hong Kong Management Association's annual report awards. Honours don't come much higher than that ...

Having perused their online menu, I devised my strategy for the evening: we would eat à la carte, no one was allowed to talk about how much anything cost (fat chance of that, of course) and I would choose the wine in advance, since, from the 20-page pdf file devoted to booze, I could only see two bottles of white that came in at under 1,000 dollars.

Not only did I write down the name of two whites (two in case one was out of stock – I'm a cunning bastard), I memorised them on the trip over on the Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui, where I was performing as Peasant With Rake and Soldier With Wobbly Hat in Donizetti's Fille du Régiment. Having done a couple of circuits of the Landmark, I finally found the escalator up to the "jardin" – actually a terrace dominated by a poster of a slimline Kate Winslet flogging "parfum" that was previously sold to gullible women with too much money by Ingrid Bergman's daughter.

Rather than being led to a table in the restaurant proper, I was shown to a private room, complete with armchairs and sideboard. It was a bit like a B&B in Bognor Regis, except that the landlady would have put up net curtains to keep vulgar actresses from staring down at you and putting you off your full English.

It was while I was waiting for my wife and daughter that I made my first mistake. I ordered a beer. As with so many of the great tragedies – Oedipus, The Wrath of Achilles, Kane and Abel – all went well at first. The Amstel duly arrived and was poured expertly behind my back by the waiter into what looked like a champagne flute. He must have poured it pretty damn slowly because the head was perfection itself. What wasn't so perfect was the fact – unbeknown to me at the time – that the contents of the bottle were unable to fit into the glass.

Act II began with the arrival of my family. This seemed to throw the other member of the waiting team – a charmless, if attractive, Mainlander – for when I ordered a bottle of the 2003 Mer Soleil (I had wanted to order an Australian chardonnay just to annoy the Froggies, but they had outmanoeuvred me by refusing to put any Australian wines whatsoever on the wine list), she seemed not to understand. I still had the Catena Zapata up my sleeve, but years of experience in Hong Kong had taught me that the best course of action at this stage was to give up the battle and ask for her colleague, the male Hongkie.

He duly arrived – very solicitously – but met my order for a bottle of the Californian chardonnay with the news that only the house wines were available by the glass. Realising that I had thrown him by having a beer by way of aperitif, I told him that I would be joining my wife in a libation and we would indeed like a bottle of the Mer Soleil.

"Oh, you are fortunate!" he replied, doing his best Basil Fawlty impression. "You may have The Last Bottle."

Seeing my beer glass was in need of replenishment, he made the fatal mistake of attempting to fill it without angling it, with the predictable result that the contents ended up all over the table. Zut alors! Madge in Bognor would take better care of her formica.

"Um, would you care for another bottle?" he asked, obviously hoping I'd say, "No, don't bother – when you're paying through the nose for a special evening out, it makes it a bit more memorable if you lose half your beer and drink from a sticky glass".

But I wasn't complaining. I'd managed to get my very own 2-for-1 happy hour beer promo out of Hong Kong's priciest eatery. A couple of minutes later, my friend returned brandishing the desired white.

"It is The Last Bottle, sir," he emphasised, in case I'd missed it the first time, and promptly poured some for my wife to taste.

Now, this is where things get a little complicated and where a flame war would be an inevitability if this were a message board rather than a humble blog. So, I beg your indulgence while I explain that – not counting the champagne flute that was used for beer – there were two glasses at each place setting. One looked like a brandy glass, the other like a white wine glass.

Except ... the staff at Joel Robuchon's had been trained that the one that looked like a ballon was for wine and the one that looked like a white wine glass was for water. How we found this out may be told in Act III.

Not comfortable putting her delicately shaped nose into the cavernous ballon, my wife had transferred her white wine to the white wine glass. A minute or two later, the Mainlander entered the room, stationed herself at my wife's left shoulder and proceeded to pour the wine from one receptacle to the other right in front of her like Madame Mao dealing with a recalcitrant Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. When I asked her to desist, she gave me a look that said "I was trained which glasses to use, you silly man" and left the room quite indignantly, no doubt to reflect on the faux pas we had committed.

After that, the rest of the evening was, I have to admit, a bit of an anti-climax. For the record, the starters and the main courses weren't terribly memorable (I've forgotten them, in other words, although I did spot a sliver of truffle at one point), but the desserts were terrific.

Not perhaps, though, sufficient cause to persuade me to go back – at least, not until the food matches the cabaret.