A few Fridays ago I was sitting in a café called Suffolk Coffee in Cheltenham, drinking a latte and feeling something I don’t generally experience before going somewhere on duty: genuine anticipation.

Because I don’t often review a Michelin starred restaurant for this blog – it’s only happened twice so far, and the last time was over 10 years ago. Reviewing somewhere like that is a test of the reviewer every bit as much as it is a test of the restaurant: is my palate up to the task of appreciating it? Is my writing up to the task of capturing it? Just as footballers want to play against the best opposition, reviewers want to review the good stuff. It’s why you’d never find one worth their salt on a hyperbolic quest to find, I don’t know, the best burger in the U.K. We bore too easily for that.

The anticipation was heightened by the fact that I was about to have lunch at one of the restaurants on my bucket list, Le Champignon Sauvage. Amid all the ebbs and flows of gastronomic fashion, Le Champignon Sauvage has held a Michelin star since 1995: only three U.K. restaurants have held one longer.

In those thirty-one years, Michelin has changed its mind about the kind of restaurants it wants to celebrate, accepted bungs from tourist associations to extend its guide to godforsaken places like Dubai, introduced its pointless Green Star and scrapped it. And for eighteen of those years Le Champignon Sauvage held two stars, until Michelin took the second one away in 2018. Nobody knows why.

Nobody ever does, by the way. I’ve eaten in some great restaurants, like 5 North Street in Winchcombe or Chelsea’s Medlar, which lost stars for reasons that pass all understanding. And I’ve eaten in restaurants that held a star with no idea how they managed to blag one in the first place. It is the great enigma, and for all the pontification online about restaurants that should have one, or should have two, for all the episodes of that Apple TV show with Gordon Ramsay and the posho from Topjaw I suspect it will remain an enigma for a long time.

But anyway, it’s food for thought: on a personal level, when Le Champignon Sauvage first won its star I was just about to leave university. Blogs didn’t exist. Nor did smartphones, and I wouldn’t have an email address for a few more years. Just to channel my own version of We Didn’t Start The Fire: New Labour; 9/11; the credit crunch; Covid; Will Young winning Pop Idol; President Obama; President Trump. All these seismic things would come to pass, they just hadn’t yet.

And in terms of food, St John had only just opened the year before: the food revolution in this country, such as it was, was in its crib. But this piece of history is even more striking: Le Champignon Sauvage has been run by a husband and wife team – Helen Everitt-Matthias running the front of house and her husband David in the kitchen – ever since it first opened in 1987.

Not for them chopping and changing, expanding to a group of restaurants and appointing new head chefs here and there. Instead, the two of them have put this restaurant on the map and kept it there for nearly forty years. In a country that changes its mind with the frequency of somebody whose attention span has been rotted by social media, a nation that swaps Prime Ministers like it’s bored and changing the channel, it feels like we won’t see Le Champignon Sauvage’s like again.

And the final evidence of that unique status is the thing Le Champignon Sauvage might be most famous for: David Everitt-Mathias is always in the kitchen. If he isn’t there, the restaurant is closed. He doesn’t do TV, and he has published three books in forty years. That’s it. If you eat in his restaurant, you know he has cooked your food. That’s unlike so many starred restaurants in the U.K. So I wanted to go there, while I still could, on a expedition to somewhere that embodied hospitality as a calling more than any other restaurant I could imagine.