The very idea of a Scottish restaurant seems a peculiar risk. You just think of all the cliches - haggis and fried Mars bar. The idea of a Scottish restaurant on Trafalgar Square takes something to get your head around. I knew Albannach was going to look beautiful as I'd seen dramatic pictures of the elegant floodlit building with the most outrageous red stag antlers chandelier and delicate Scottish blue and heather colours. I'd also read about whiskies at £500 a shot. I'd read about a Cullen Skink soup that nobody seemed to understand. I wasn't sure what to expect but I thought it needed to be appreciated with someone who is Scottish so I invited Darius who is apparently fond of all things true to his heritage. He was late because he got pickpocketed. The thing I mind about people being late is waiting in bars on my own. The good thing was I didn't mind at all waiting here. It managed to be glamorous and cosy, decadent and smart and I liked talking to the sweetly passionate Niall Barnes who was rather glamorous in his kilt and in his pride. The cocktail list was rather lovely, as it was supplied by Tony Conigliaro it would be. A whisky sour with liquorice was uplifting. By the time Darius arrived we were on to amaretto sours with cherry but there was lots of other more wintry warming style cocktails involving Drambuie and black pepper, or an apple and lavender Bellini inspired by heather tones.

It's a dramatic kind of a room, yet very comforting and I loved that. The small lamps were also of stag antlers. Apparently they don't have to be killed for them - they just drop off. They came from Scotland but got sent to Eastern Europe to be made into lamps. I was deeply covetous of such a thing. The main restaurant overlooks the bar but there's also a pannelled room off that with beautiful black and white Scottish photographs by landscape photographer Charlie Waite. It's like sitting in the private decadence of a Highlander's home and the service was as attentive.

The effort to detail was something you could see and touch and taste. Darius had the hand caught roasted scallops with fennel puree which were sweet, melt in the mouth, rich, delicate and I had a salad of asparagus, perky little pickled artichokes and quail's eggs. Not a haggis to be found which impressed me because I'm not a lover of a cliche, nor do I think sheeps stomach and oats would be right for a London eaterie. The menu is succinct, but with plenty of choice. The head chef is John Paul McLachlan who brings with him his experience working for Gordon Ramsay at Amaryllis and with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir au Quat'Saisons. Actually it's a pretty good fusion of the best of Gordon and the best of Raymond. It has Gordon's delicate touch and Raymond's sense of surprise and then it's honed down into something very elegant that manages to be classic, French and Caledonian. You feel that you are in Scotland, as an intellectual tourist. Everything about the place is subtle; the colours, the different Scottish crests embossed into the floor downstairs. It's all underplayed, in true Scottish disposition. For my main course I had the spiced Skye monkfish tail with mussels and saffron vegetable broth. It was delicate, light and lovely. The monkfish tail fell away. It wasn't any of your tough, stringy monkfish that you imagine would have been crawling around for a few hundred years as monkfish can sometimes taste prehistoric. Darius opted for the fillet of beef with baby spinach and hermitage sauce. He cleaned his plate very quickly although I did manage to taste some of it. A good choice if you're a beef lover.

When the waiter suggested we might want to share a dessert Darius looked a bit panicky. No, and he needed extra ice cream as well. I had a chocolate tart with a prune ice-cream and some of Darius's creme brulee with golden sultana compot. Creme brulee is of course a great test of a restaurant. Sometimes it feels too fatty and globby, sometimes it feels too thick and smooth. We managed to miss the Scottish dessert called Cranachan, a delicious mix of oatmeal, shortbread, cream and winter berries. I don't know how we missed this as we didn't miss much else from the dessert menu. Then with our coffee came a delicious piece of Scottish tablet, a kind of over zealous fudge that's got five times the amount of sugar, in fact it really is just sugar with a hint of toffee flavour.

We went downstairs for some cosy sofa slumping and more cocktails of course. I had been banging on about how much I loved the stag chandelier so much that Naill found me a spare antler which I intend to wire up and furnish with a lace lampshade. It was such a perfect evening. Standing in Trafalgar Square hailing a cab with an antler was just the perfect ending to the evening