The restaurant at Fergus Henderson‘s new St John Hotel stands as a gently lit oasis of white and stainless-steel functionality amid the glare and sleaze of after-hours Leicester Square. The grilled skirt steak with beef dripping chips, herb-shallot mustard and cress pares down the only-in-London St John dining experience to a minimalist ideal: The 41st best restaurant in the world compressed into a hotel canteen in the short form of a subdued late-night menu with meat and potatoes in the middle.

The menu positioning of the skirt-n-chips does a disservice only to the easily overlooked selections listed below it: suckling pig and dandelion, sea bass, baked celeriac & shard, bacon & beans. Like a vaudeville comic asked to take the late-show stage after the Marx Brothers you just don’t want to be billed beneath the St John’s take on steak frites. Here that classic duo is a crusty, crispy, saucy, succulent and thoroughly satisfying act to catch ’round midnight or thereabouts.

At £16.40 it would be one of the most alluring late-night relationships between quality and price anywhere were it not for a push-up wine list with premiums that make its exclusively French options look more fully bodied than they are (an act of illusion hardly foreign to Leicester Square). Having steak frites without red wine goes against my belief system, no matter how late the hour, but so does paying double, triple or quadruple the price of those steak frites for a bottle.

Please please, Mr Henderson, add a good, young £20 table red to the wine list, even if you have to list it in small print at the very bottom, beneath your phone number and url. Otherwise any overpriced alternatives printed below it might become as unnoticed as the poor schnook asked to close for Groucho.