Hiatt Baker Hall, University of Bristol, restaurant review Passing lightly over exactly how the terminal misunderstanding arose, and pausing to state for the record that no charges were ever laid, the bare facts, M'lud, are these. One summer evening, long ago, the night before the postgraduate solicitor's exam for which I was enrolled in London, I was arrested in the hallway of a friend's Bristol home by 14 officers, and eventually taken home at 3am in one of four panda cars in attendance. No soothsayer had to be consulted to unravel this omen. The sooth spoke perfectly well for itself. The exams, which I'd spectacularly failed the previous year, were never to be resat; and so I did what the terminally indolent invariably did in those days when they couldn't conceivably do anything else. I became a journalist. Yet despite my luminous lack of competence in the legal field, I shall risk one jurisprudential pronouncement: that the following account of a return to the alma mater is in clear, prima facie breach of Trades Descriptions legislation. The one inalienable and irrefutable requirement for a restaurant review is, after all, a restaurant; and the dining room at my old hall of residence is not one of those. So far as I can work out, there are only three ways to dine at Hiatt Baker Hall. One is by right of residency, another by warden's invitation - and the third is to do a Brandon Lee by pretending to be half your age, trolling in, and taking your chances on cadging a free meal. Appealing as the third option must seem in these straitened times, I cannot recommend it. Not having met the warden. At 6ft 9in, Gordon Trevett is the most intimidating human creature on whom I have ever set eyes. And I once sat next to Lennox Lewis. Had I known this about him at the time, I probably would not have likened Hiatt Baker to the Lubyanka, as I did in an article earlier this year. Truth to tell, such a comparison does the Lubyanka no favours. Built in 1898, the infamous Muscovite prison and KGB HQ is a rather fine neo-Baroque building, whereas Hiatt Baker is a sprawling mass of Sixties red-brick blocks better suited, with hindsight, to the outskirts of Bucharest. But a certain Cold War frisson is undeniable, and it cannot be pure coincidence that one of Hiatt Baker's elite corps of distinguished alumni, Jonathan Evans, is the current director of MI5. Far from taking umbrage at my reference, Gordon the Warden graciously invited me to a recent Formal Night, and after a relaxing 40-minute battle with the clip-on Moss Bros dicky bow (is there anything more vulgar than being able to tie one yourself?), a memorable evening ensued. Or more accurately, half a memorable evening. Of the second half, spent in the bar, the memory is poor, though I learnt more from those two hours than in three years at university. The lesson is this: after plenty of wine and much port, under no circumstances try to settle the stomach with seven large Jack Daniel's on the rocks. By this stage, three other lessons had already been mastered. 1) When dining at your old hall or college, try to avoid having a biro leak all over your hands so that you resemble Just William after an ink fight; 2) Undergraduates today are infinitely better mannered, less gauche and generally nicer than they used to be; and 3) University catering has improved dramatically since the Eighties. Young'uns today, huh? Dunno they're born. After a gently spiced, well-textured carrot and coriander soup, with a fresh bread roll, Gordon the Warden strove to compensate for a dearth of gull's eggs with an end-of-academic-year address designed to suggest the master of a grand, interwar Oxbridge college, in which he thanked the cleaning staff "for unblocking the sinks, with all the vomit..." All frightfully Brideshead, with perhaps just a dash of CP Snow. Next came the slow-cooked blade of beef with bubble and squeak in a red wine jus. The meat was pink, tender and hot, shaming the congealed excrescences with which the corporate banqueting veteran will be familiar. "For a meal in a hall," said the magnificently Dickensian old friend I hadn't seen for decades, who, as the university's head warden, knows about such things, "this is remarkably good." The grand piano in a corner of the room proved a red herring when the purveyors of the evening's music turned out to be an all-female rock band. Any residual Oxbridge reject chippiness evaporated. One thing you don't get on high table at Trinity or Balliol is a bunch of Joan Jetts manquées. We finished up with a fine pear and almond tart with vanilla mascarpone and, after coffee, port and cheese in the senior common room, it was off to that bar until last orders. "So, comrade, do you still reckon we're the Lubyanka?" asked Gordon the Warden the next morning. Of course not, I said, thanking him for a sparkling night, before murmuring inaudibly that, whatever that crybaby Solzhenitsyn may have thought on the point, no one ever left a KGB interrogation cell feeling half as rough as this.