Malmaison Oxford has become an important part of the city’s social scene since it opened shortly before Christmas in 2005 in what had previously been Oxford Prison. So popular has it proved that at times it seems almost as hard to enter as it once was to leave. This applies particularly to its excellent brasserie. When I tried to book a few weeks ago, there was not a table all night. Last Saturday, they were able to fit the three of us in, but not at the time I wanted. It could be either 7.15pm, which was far too early, or 8.45pm — just a little too late but clearly the time we would have to go for.

In the event, we arrived to find our table still not ready, and not likely to be vacated for 15 minutes. Would we like to have a drink in the Visitors’ Room upstairs? I was about to say yes when Rosemarie dived in with a few sharp words to the effect that we had already had a drink (at the Swan and Castle round the corner) and now wanted our dinner. We would wait where we were, she said, and have a look at the menu.

Firmness paid off, because a minute or two later, before we had got very far down the list, a table came free. It was in my favourite side room, fashioned from three former cells knocked into one. It seated 24 people, the same number that might have been accommodated in the old days. Later on, surrounded by the good things in life, I thought of their unhappy lot as I gazed through the window on to “that little tent of blue/We prisoners called the sky”.

By then, dinner was well under way, and going swimmingly. Rosemarie had started with one of the evening’s specials, a brimming bowl of creamy chilled mint soup. Her mother was meanwhile enjoying what must have been the last gasp of this summer’s asparagus (such is Malmaison’s commitment to local produce that I can’t conceive of its having been flown in from abroad). It came with a perfectly poached egg and truffle vinaigrette.

I was eating a well-flavoured slice of rabbit and chicken terrine, slightly surprised to find (1) the presence of a sharp little bone in it that oughtn’t to have been there and (2) that it came, like the soup, with no form of accompanying starch. Happily, we had asked for a basket of bread, with pats of delicious unsalted butter and tapenade.

To drink, I had ordered a bottle of white Côtes du Ventoux (Les Combes, TerraVentoux). While perhaps not as “dry textured” as the wine list had led me to hope it would be, it nonetheless proved a reasonable accompaniment to all our food.

This demanded some versatility, since the dishes were as varied as fillet of halibut for me, smoked haddock for Rosemarie and loin of pork for Olive.

My fish, acceptable as it was, was not quite the shining chunk I expected but, like the thousands of rejected halibuts in the Monty Python sketch, “a bit too flat”. Could it, I wondered, have been Greenland halibut? It came with a salad of sun-dried tomatoes (fine) and seaweed which was rather too salty.

But the juicy pork (with crushed Jersey Royals, sage and lemon) and the undyed poached haddock with black pudding both passed muster, though the coddled leeks with the latter were not coddled enough and therefore rather crunchy.

I glanced at the puddings (noting the rogue apostrophe in the ‘spiced madeleine’s’ that came with the crème brûlée), but decided to pass. Olive was impressed with her hot chocolate pot with chantilly cream; Rosemarie had one scoop of chocolate ice cream, which showed rare restraint.