I’m developing some clear preferences in my old age, I think. Nowadays I’ve got a strong preference for more informal mid-range dining, preferably ambitious and often ethnic. Small plates almost always feature. But as Row on 5 has just reminded me, I also love a real splurge on a destination restaurant where you feel super looked-after, the food is just one notch beyond expectations, the surroundings are plush and the whole experience is essentially indulgent.

There’s another class of dining in between these two: fine dining, usually tasting menu, sometimes ambitious and/or ethnic, friendly service. It’s this end of things I seem to have lost interest in. It’s often pricy without being truly indulgent, and yet the needs of fine dining means it can’t be as BOOM with flavours. At the end of the day, I usually forget those meals within a couple of weeks of eating them. Snack, snack, snack, seafood, fish, meat, cheese, pre-dessert, dessert, petit fours n coffee, rinse and repeat.

Of course that was the essence of the menu at Row on 5 too. A lot of particularly good dishes, which I’ll come back to. But the memorable meals are so often the wider experience. They have a beautiful lounge space downstairs and a beautiful dining room above, with striking lighting and a great open kitchen. It feels properly glamorous. The service is pitched just perfect too: very friendly, but highly polished. You are made to feel special. They have a gigantic wine tome. HUGE. ENORMOUS. And while I usually grumble at wine lists where so few wines are sub-£100 that you’d feel like a pauper ordering one of them, on this occasion the passion implied by the gigantic tome makes it alright. Their wine collection is on display all over the restaurant too; when we returned downstairs for petit fours and coffees, they sat us in the private wine room where we could mooch the collection and their wine library. See? I’ll remember this meal for a lot longer. As long as the food was okay…

It was. Superb, in fact. I’ve had a few venison main courses this winter, but the piece of sika deer loin here was in another class. I’ve no idea whether it was the sourcing, storage or cooking but it was a magical piece of meat. Even if the blackcurrant and beetroot elements were hardly innovative (just very excellent). The five-spicy dim sum of shredded venison was a delicious but also stunningly presented addition, like a tiny fuzzy comet.

Having started in the middle I need to rewind, as some of the snacks were splendid. The dice of tuna loin on a crisp little squid ink case, topped with a tiny slice of fatty otoro tuna, singing with a fragrant hit of yuzu, was one of the standouts. Delicate pieces of raw langoustine with tiny crisp flowers of finger lime on top and a sabayonne of salted egg was another. The base was a clear tomato gel with a wonderfully deep and smoky flavour over which the finger lime hummed beautifully. Also very much loved the scallop, unashamedly meaty and dense, well caramelised with a frankly yummy XO glaze. Best scallop I’ve had in a while.

The bread course was more indulgence, more like a crisply glazed pastry served with chicken skin butter. Naughty. The main fish course was turbot, of course. The sauce was bold, made with monkfish liver, dotted with fermented chunks of razor clam and peeled grapes, finished with plenty of lovage oil. The whole dish was lovely. After the venison came a lovely little Stilton tartlet, a refreshing zip of kaffir lime snow on a Sauternes jelly, and then a very accomplished chocolate pudding full of bitter-sweet flavours and Jerusalem artichoke ice cream. Yes, yes, we’d enjoyed the Giant Wine Tome too much at this point for me to keep careful notes…

The bill was, of course, as massive as the wine tome. The menu is £250 per head before drinks. It’s a price I’m willing to pay (occasionally!) for a special occasion, to feel indulgent and indulged for a whole evening; we were there from 18:30 to 23:00 …so if you calculate your restaurant bill per hour, this is ironically much closer in value to some modern tasting menu places where you’re in-and-out in 1.5 hours and the bill is around £300 for two! I’ll leave you to decide where you place value, but Row on 5 definitely scores highly in flavour, quality, indulgence and service on anyone’s scale.