Some London restaurants have a sense of history that you can feel as soon as you walk through the door. Savoy Grill is one of them. The beautiful dining room has all the Art Deco polish you'd hope for: warm lighting, elegant tables, plush seating and just the right amount of glamour.

When we arrived, the early-evening crowd was beginning to settle in. The room had a pleasant buzz without feeling frantic, and the welcome was polished but genuinely warm. Nobody was making us feel that we ought to be on our best behaviour. Quite the opposite: it felt like somewhere to enjoy yourself.

We were there to celebrate a weekend together. A lovely dining room, good company and the prospect of a show afterwards made the whole thing feel rather special before we'd even picked up a fork.

On our September visit, the Savoy Grill pre-theatre menu was advertised at £59 for two courses or £66 for three. There was a small but appealing choice across each course, with optional supplements for certain dishes. It's a more approachable way to eat here than ordering freely from the à la carte menu, although the headline price isn't necessarily what you'll pay when you leave.

We chose three courses. What I really wanted to know was whether the kitchen would treat the set menu as an afterthought. Happily, nothing about the cooking suggested that it did.

We began with chicken and mushroom terrine and chalk stream trout. The terrine was the richer of the two: savoury, carefully presented and very much in keeping with Savoy Grill's classic style of cooking.

But that trout. Beautifully delicate, fresh and full of flavour, it was exactly the sort of dish I love: precise without being fussy. I can still remember it weeks later, which is generally a very good sign.

For the mains we had turbot and a wild mushroom risotto, two very different plates and both a pleasure to eat.

The turbot was the dish that stayed with me. Rolled in nori, finished with a dark, glossy jus and surrounded by delicate vegetables and herbs, it felt elegant and assured. The fish was the focus, as it should be. It was the sort of cooking that makes a complicated-looking plate feel completely effortless.

The risotto was comfort of a more luxurious sort: earthy mushroom flavour, creamy rice and generous savoury depth. It looked beautiful, too, though I particularly appreciated that there was proper substance behind the presentation.

These were dishes I'd have been pleased to receive on any menu, not merely on one offered before the theatre.

We finished with Madagascan vanilla cheesecake and a selection of cheeses. The cheesecake was a lovely-looking conclusion, but I'm a cheese person. Given the choice of a cheese board, I'll usually take it.

Unfortunately, the cheese arrived distinctly cold. Straight-from-the-fridge cold. And as far as I'm concerned, cheese served at the wrong temperature is a minor tragedy. The texture is firmer, the flavour more muted, and half the point of choosing good cheese is lost.

It was a small slip in an otherwise exceptional meal, but worth mentioning precisely because everything else had been handled so well.

Pre-theatre dining lives or dies by its pacing. You want time to enjoy the food, but you really don't want to spend the final course looking at your watch.

The service here was exactly what we'd hoped for: attentive, professional and comfortable in its own skin. The room gradually filled around us, but we never had the sense of being hurried along. And when there was a small problem, it was handled kindly rather than defensively.

For an evening that had another appointment waiting at the theatre, that calm competence was a large part of the appeal.

A quick word about the bathrooms at The Savoy, because honestly, they deserve one.

Black-and-white chequerboard flooring, great expanses of marble, gold-framed mirrors and those immaculate rows of hand towels. It's opulence at its finest. I went in to wash my hands and came out having had an entirely separate interior-design experience.

There are hotel bathrooms, and then there are bathrooms that seem to expect you to emerge wearing diamonds. These are very much the latter.

Our three-course menu was £66 per person, but with drinks and extras the final spend was approximately £95 each. Worth keeping in mind if you're drawn in by the advertised set-menu price alone.

Could you eat very well elsewhere in London for less? Of course. But the value here isn't simply about what's on the plate. You're also paying for the room, the service, the sense of occasion and the pleasure of an evening that feels just a little out of the ordinary.

Crucially, the food was good enough to justify the visit independently of all that glamour. That's what makes the Savoy Grill pre-theatre menu a worthwhile option rather than just a clever way of saying you've eaten at The Savoy.