I can see why there’s a lot of love for Flor going around. There’s lots of smoky flame-grilled flavours, plenty of on-trend seasonal ingredients, a stylish and beautiful bar/dining room, and even though it’s a small plate place you don’t have to queue because they take bookings like civilised people. What’s not to like? Well… maybe the price. A light supper for two doesn’t usually flip over the £100 mark unless we’re drinking veeeeery seeeeriously – and we weren’t. Just two glasses each. Promise.

But look, there really is a lot to enjoy here. The delicate mushroom tart had a good dose of that smoky flame-kissed flavour, some fine chunks of sturdy wild mushrooms and a lip-smacking mushroom cream (to finish up with the jolly good sourdough). Next up was a big, plump, white burrata just ooooozing on the plate. I could tell it wanted me to eat it. And it came with chunks of fat, juicy peach that had been blackened to the flavour of caramel candy, and a good sprinkling of sweetly aniseedy fennel pollen. Just joy on a plate.

By contrast, toast topped with salted anchovies and a layer of fine lardo was simply filth on a plate. Mad powerful flavour. Who doesn’t love a faceful of anchovy? With lardo?

Then again, who doesn’t want a gently grilled fillet of smoked eel, topped by flame-seared red cabbage and a spoonful of cooking liquor? I love smoked eel so damn much that whenever I’m offered it on a menu I can’t help the paranoid suspicion that the kitchen is somehow trying to bribe me. And this a whole flippin’ fillet! Reader, we ate it.

And that was it for savoury. Four small plates. We had puds too. Mine was of creamy stracciatella cheese with sticky-sweet fragola grapes and a crunchy wafer. It was nice. Maureen’s was the renowned brown butter cakes. How they manage to turn an entire pack of butter into two tiny cakes the size of champagne corks I will never know, but that is the general effect and it is rather magnificent. If a bit scary.

So, Flor. Loved everything I ate. In which case, perhaps it’s a bit mean to fret over £32 each for a light supper before drinks? It’s a stylish place, they look after you well, the wine list is good. I’d definitely go back. I’d take friends there.

Food has come a long way in the UK in 20 years. I can remember a time when any sort of visitor attraction – be it a zoo, a gallery, a museum or a country house – could be absolutely guaranteed to have a truly miserable canteen where, because you’re a captive audience, you could expect to pay over the odds for sandwiches in packets that conspired to be snot soggy and cardboard dry at the same time, with the filling shuffled to the front edge with deliberate cynicism to hide how little actual industrial cheddar and slimy lettuce was really inside. Or for some hideous hot special dolloped out like school dinners and needing a fistful of tiny condiment packets to give it some flavour. The hot chocolate always tasted like scorched milk peed into by a rat who might have once eaten a bit of kitkat.

Present day, and you can actually get a decent bite to eat in a lot of attractions. I had a lovely slice of lamb and mint pie at the country house somewhere Midlands-ish recently. And some places have even attracted rave-worthy chefs to their canteen. For example, the Rochelle Canteen at the ICA just off the end of Regent’s Park. To be fair, zoos do tend to still charge way over the odds for bloody criminal food; flaccid chips and hotdogs that probably need a biohazard warning. Sadly I suspect it’s because only parents with tiny kids (and us) go to zoos.

We tucked away two courses at the Rochelle Canteen before a show. The menu is short, but everything is appealing. Their style is pared down, take-as-you-find, the kind of dishes that a competent country yeoman could chuck together in his Aga kitchen from good stuff kept in the walk-in larder. Just probably better than most country yeomen would manage.

Our starters are things on toast. Maureen’s is a proudly flavourful chicken liver pate, spread thick, with cornichons. Mind is cold slices of meltingly good rump, cheerfully pink, and covering the slice of toasted sourdough two layers thick. Also covering a thick spread of punchy horseradish cream!

For main, I tuck into a well-grilled middlewhite chop. It goes very well with the friendly dollop of aioli and a very good salad of thinly sliced kohlrabi, fennel and radish. The dressing is zingy and does eventually get a bit much. Maureen’s main is a pie. To be more prosaic, it’s a gratin dish sloppily draped with a thick blanket of naughtily scrumptious short pastry and hiding a splendidly rich and satisfying filling of slow-cooked beef shin with pickled walnut. Scooping out a mouthful while the steam rises out of the pastry it was very hard not to make like the Bisto kid and “Ahhhhhhh!” out loud.

Three courses is going to be £32-ish here, and the wines by the glass aren’t at all budget. To me that’s perhaps the only teensy reservation: the quality of the cooking is excellent, but the pared-back canteen pate-on-toast feel of the place doesn’t really stack up with the price point for me. Might be a failure of imagination on my part. And after all, that pie really was sexy.

Beef and offal kofta is a lovely meaty sausage with that slight iron-y tang from whatever bits and bobs have gone into it. Beautifully grilled. On the menu it’s described as “beef and offal kofta, smashed cucumber” which is a hilarious piece of the menu writer’s art. You can just imagine the chef vigorously taking a meat tenderised to a long green cucumber. But no, alas, it’s just diced cucumber stirred up with a blob of yogurt and ground spices. We’re at Rovi, Ottolenghi’s new place in Fitzrovia.

Maureen’s snack is more lavish and equally delicious; lobster crumpet coated in sesame seeds with a really tangy Asian-flavoured kumquat and chilli dipping liquor. Very imaginative, and that’s the sense I get at Rovi: that they’re determined to play and experiment, refusing to do straight-up eastern Mediterranean cooking without changing it up a gear.

Sometimes this works out very inspiring. Tempura stems and leaves are just spot on; lightly battered forage sprinkled with enough pepper and salt to make the herbal flavours of the leaves sing out, and will a dipping liquor that had a highly fragrant flavour of watermelon.

The hogget ribs I cannot quite love. The wonderful flavour of mature hogget is packed in strongly, but the ribs have been roasted down to such a black intensity that it’s kinda hard work getting through them, and the pomegranate molasses don’t provide enough moisture to make up the balance. Pity. Grilled cucumber with an earthy/fragrant peanut sambal is much better, as is the celeriac shwarma with a fermented chilli and tomato sauce. The celeriac pieces still have some bite, the fermented tomato sauce is absolutely brilliant.

I think £38 each would be right for food, before drinks. On the one hand, I applaud the brave combinations and the imagination here. On the other hand, the results aren’t as balanced, precise and memorable as I’d hope at that price. I’m not expecting Rovi to be a regular destination.