What the Oysterage lacks in frills it more than makes up for with its flavoursome, no-nonsense cooking

Orford, Suffolk (01394 450 277). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £70

It would be hard to describe the Butley Orford Oysterage as pretty, especially on a deep midwinter’s day when even by lunchtime the light looks like it’s had enough and is thinking of packing up for the day. The Suffolk sky hangs low and heavy, and from time to time there is the smell on the air of smoking fish, like every day here is kipper day. Inside it is all metal-framed chairs on hard, dark-tiled floors. The paintwork is picked out in that shade of diluted pea green that used to be reserved for institutional crockery – the sort that bounced when you dropped it. The dining room has the feel of a cottage hospital café circa 1962, the sort where you might wait to hear from a consultant who looked like James Robertson Justice whether your loved one’s bunion operation went well. In one way that’s not far off, for the restaurant did launch in the 60s, when postwar London refusenik Richard Pinney was looking for an outlet for the smoked fish and oysters that were the core of his business.

And that is where the beauty lies. Not in the crockery or the paintwork or the lighting – none of which looks like it has altered much. It lies in the fish. The smokehouse Pinney’s of Orford is still there, and still smoking fish over whole oak logs pretty much as it was when Pinney set it up. They are still fishing out oysters from Butley Creek, where he first sowed them, using Portuguese rocks. And what oysters! Rarely do you eat oysters because you are hungry. Or, to put it another way, you may be hungry, but half a dozen raw oysters won’t fill you up. They enliven you. They slap you round the chops. They make you widen your eyes and let out a hiss of pleasure. These ones do all that and more. They are huge. They are big, sweet, meaty things. At £1.20 each they are also cheap. I swoon. I declare myself unequal to the task. I leave one uneaten. The shame!

For there are other things to be brought to me, by a bunch of sturdy, cheerful women who look like they have been in the fetching and carrying business for a fair old time. That is the pleasure of the place. It’s not out of date because it never had a date. It’s never out of fashion because it’s never been in fashion. A special of their own taramasalata may not remind me of that made by the mother of my Greek-Cypriot friend. Hers was creamy and light. This is big and butch and salty and all the better for that. It is full of fish oils and the tang of real smoke. A plate of sweet grilled squid is just that: small bodies, curly tentacles, none of it introduced to the heat for too long.

And then the mains. Stand back. Clear a bit of space. Something large is coming. There is a special of cod with a herb crust, flavoured with lemongrass. It is so big it looks like a sofa. If you couldn’t get a bed for the night this plateful would do. (And don’t send me cross notes about the sustainability of cod; have a look at what’s happening in the Barents Sea.) Perhaps inevitably, with such a big piece of fish, the ends are a little overcooked, but in the middle the flakes fall gently away from each other, as if that had always been their purpose, and they had only been hanging out together to pass the time. I have a skate wing in a pond of hot, acidulated brown butter with capers, and the flesh also pulls away from the cartilage with no effort whatsoever. It is there to serve.

There are boiled new potatoes. There is bread and butter. There is contented chatter. And that’s about it. The wine list is serviceable and, like all the pricing here, ungrasping. The cost shown here is only for those who insist upon gluttony. We order a slice of their warm chocolate cake with pistachio ice cream plus two spoons, more out of a desire to show willing than anything else. It is light and uncloying and completely unnecessary. We have been bathed in butter and good seafood. We have been fed well and, it feels, we have been fed often. No, the Butley Orford Oysterage is not pretty. But it is good, and that’s what matters.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place

Life and style: Restaurants | guardian.co.uk

On the wall above the semi-open kitchen at this week’s restaurant is the slogan: “Create – where good food and people matter.” Anybody with a healthy disdain for mission statements, sloganeering and the unintentional kitsch of Hallmark greeting cards will immediately hear alarm bells and ear-bleeding sirens. In a world sodden with motivational cobblers which regularly commits grievous bodily harm against the English language, we can be forgiven for being hostile to this sort of stuff. In this case, it is safe to disengage the early-warning systems. Create is a different sort of restaurant business, and there is much more to its slogans than mere vocabulary bingo.

Create is the latest manifestation of a social-enterprise venture which has been operating in the north for a few years, helping to get the long-term unemployed and disadvantaged back into the habit of work through a series of 12-week training schemes around food businesses. Up to now they have run a set of outside catering operations. A few months ago it finally secured the backing to launch a standalone restaurant and brought in Richard Walton-Allen, former head chef at Harvey Nichols in Leeds, to act as executive chef. A backbone of full-time professionals both front and back of house is supported by a roster of Create trainees. “If you can get yourself into work on time, put on the uniform, follow a recipe and cook a dish you can do almost any job,” Walton-Allen told me. It’s not about training up people to work in the food world, it’s simply about training them up for the world of work.

All of this is admirable, but would be a pointless waste of good ingredients if the restaurant was a calamity. It has to be a good place to eat first, second and third. All the other stuff then has to tuck in behind. Happily, Create is a good place to eat. The huge airy space with its big splashes of colour has a relaxed, easy feel (though they could probably do with turning down, or losing, the piped music. Or better still, losing it altogether). The menu is completely fluent in modern British, which is to say: food from all over the shop put together in sensible combinations. A plate of thinly sliced smoked venison, for example, with fresh figs alongside properly dressed rocket leaves is a thoroughly pretty plateful; crisp-shelled fritters of salt cod are a little dense but only because they haven’t been bulked up with potato. No matter: the tarragon mayonnaise helps them on their way.

Prices are noticeably ungrasping: £14 isn’t much money for a complex dish of partridge breast with confited leg, creamed Brussels sprouts, chestnuts and a generous handful of sautéed girolles. Even better value is one of the best-cooked hunks of skirt steak I have ever enjoyed, with a smoky charcoal char outside and a blush of pink within. There’s no point pretending: skirt is a cut solely for those with all their own teeth, but it rewards the effort.

The chocolate and orange mousse with a brash tangerine sorbet had the virtue of not being cloyingly oversweetened; a soft meringue and chocolate roulade had the virtue of looking like the sort of thing you might actually want to buy from the freezer cabinet at Iceland but wouldn’t dream of purchasing for fear of being spotted by the neighbours.

Service is entirely unremarkable – I cannot tell you if we were served by the pros or the trainees, though we did have cause to interact with almost everyone working the room. In short, while Create may be a social enterprise designed to vanquish the dismal, dreary, soul-destroying inequities of unemployment, you will merely regard it as a nice place to go for lunch. And go you should, because it deserves your support.

On the back wall is a further set of slogans: “Create is about believing”; “Believing that food is about hospitality not theatre, caring not showing off”; “Believing that people can grow, thrive and excel when given the chance”; “Believing that businesses and ordinary people can do extraordinary things”. It says much for the success of this place that by the end of lunch even this cynical old dog was ready to clamber on to his hind legs and applaud.

Guardian UK

34 Grosvenor Square, London W1 (020 3350 2424). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £130

Sitting in a corner by the bar at 34, the new restaurant from the group behind the Ivy and Le Caprice among others, is a box-fresh baby grand piano. I’ll be honest – that’s enough for me. Any restaurant can invest in new cruet sets, a serious steak grill – the must-have accessory in London’s high-end kitchens these days – or enough crisp linen to wrap the Reichstag. But spending a fat four-figure sum on a beautiful hunk of wood and wire shows an uncommon commitment. As an enthusiastic (as against good) jazz pianist, it thrills me they have decided to install someone at the keys every night; indeed, that there will be a jazz trio on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. It is a romantic, classy, gloriously old-fashioned touch.

All of which sums up the place. 34 is the most self-assured, delicious London restaurant launch in years. Everything, from the look of the place through the killer steaks to the desserts, is bang on. It is sexy and smart. Most of all it feels like it has been there for years rather than just a few weeks.

At which point I should declare an interest: I am a member of the Ivy Club, which is also owned by the perennially young Richard Caring, boss of the group that owns 34. This, however, has never stopped me saying what I think about his other places; Google my recent review of Le Caprice, then wash the blood off your hands. It did mean that I didn’t have trouble getting a table at a reasonable hour, when they were otherwise offering high tea or bed time. Amusingly they asked me not to mention this in the review because they didn’t want to give the impression that it’s just a place for those in the know. For the owners of the Ivy to worry about people thinking they are just for VIPs is a little like a lion getting upset for being called a carnivore. And, anyway, it’s part of the appeal. One of the reasons for wanting to eat at these restaurants is the allure of the phone-hackerati who are said to eat there. On any given night many tables really are filled by those whose privacy the tabs have deemed worth invading.

34 will soon be the same, and yet with a bit of planning getting a table at a sensible time is doable. The food is worth the effort. Witness a soft onion tart of flaky, buttery pastry with perfectly sautéed lamb sweetbreads and a slick of sweet-savoury jus, or a plate of salt-baked beets with a tumble of burrata, the in-vitro version of mozzarella.

In early publicity, 34 allowed itself to be billed as a meaty version of its sister fish restaurant Scott’s. I’m not sure that’s true. The menu is broader than that. But certainly a list of very good steaks is at its core, including Australian Wagyu at fearsome prices and Scottish cuts which are both more affordable and leave less of a whacking carbon footprint, with American steaks in between. My rib eye was simply a great piece of meat, cooked with care and precision. We loved another dish of long-braised short rib, slipping from the bone, with winter vegetables. Sides are worth making space for: creamed sweet corn with chilli and basil or Brussels sprouts with a crust of crumbed prosciutto and hazelnuts.

And then there’s dessert. In a city where you can have anything you like as long as it’s a chocolate fondant, a crème brûlée or a lemon tart, the 34 list is special. We didn’t have the pear tart or the sloe-gin fizz jelly or the butterscotch sponge pudding. We did have the chocolate bomb, a sphere of chocolate on to which was poured a hot sauce of same, melting it to reveal mint ice cream. There were also hot, sugared donuts with a dipping bowl of a zingy lemon curd and another of chocolate sauce. And if you don’t want to eat that right this instant, you are reading the wrong page.

Is any of this cheap? Don’t be silly. This is a flash restaurant in the flashiest corner of flash London. But with cold, economic winds blowing hard in 2012, we need to know where it’s worth spending whatever spare cash we might have. 34 is that place.

Guardian UK