We arrive at Condita ever so slightly mutinous because it’s an exasperating restaurant to get to grips with. It serves dinner only, from Tuesday to Saturday.

Its website, although pretty enough, is cryptic. Dinner is “by Conor Toomey” – never heard of him – with dishes “based on ingredients from around Scotland” – so what?

We glean the hard fact that it charges a hefty £50 or £80 for five or eight courses respectively, but what we might expect on the plate for these sizeable sums is an enigma.

Why not pick up the phone then? “To make a booking please e-mail rather than phone,” which we do, and wait for someone to email us back.

Condita sounds like more of a hobby than a business.

We leave Condita, almost three hours after we walk in the door, utterly enchanted.

My dining partner thinks that this might be one of the very best meals of his life. I meanwhile, a harder nut to crack, have undergone something of a conversion to long, drawn-out tasting menus.

This meal slips by like a languorous dream, unfolding pleasure after pleasure.

It starts with an exquisite silky-sweet poached mussel, topped by a seaweed emulsion and black pearls of caviar, sitting in an edible shell made from potato and squid ink, a perfect first bite.

It gives us the measure of the cooking level here, technically highly accomplished yet anchored by a sympathetic, highly intuitive understanding of the flavour properties and potential of ingredients.

From here on in we feel as if we’re being led into an adventure. Not one of those passive eating experiences where you’re babied and told to open your mouth so that a waiter can squirt a pipette at a precise point of your soft palate.

The mussel earned our consent and won our trust. Now our curiosity is spiked. What next? Haddock, poached in a “nage” (wine and vegetable stock).

It’s been “sandwiched” between hot salty wafers made from crisp-roasted chicken skin, dressed with vinaigrette made from the nage, topped with crème fraiche and, somehow or other, confit egg yolk has been grated over it. The contrast of the simple fish with the brittle, fatty skin is blissful.

Up comes the next offering, boned chicken wing, stuffed with smoked eel, and grilled in the Japanese yakitori manner.

The blackness of the grill accentuates the smokiness of the eel; unctuous grilled skin encases the succulent brown meat.

If these were served as canapés it would be a sensational party. Our appetites are standing to attention, begging for more.

Now it’s time for our own little sourdough loaf. It’s made from a three-year old sourdough starter known as Lazarus because it seemed dead and was revived, and has been fermented for 23 hours.

Its mercury-black crust, when we tackle it, sounds like an iceberg cracking. We anoint it with salty goat’s butter.

Now we’ve got to the celeriac, treated four ways. Salt-baked slices taste as good as salsify. A very finely cut raw remoulade caps that. The skin has been deep-fried to make crisps.

Then there’s the sauce, creamy and slightly caramelised, the ecru tones of the vegetable brightened by a few dashes of limpid green celery oil.

We’re so into this meal that we still have space for this extraordinarily tender fillet of salt-aged roe deer, which nestles in among mustardy scurvy grass, wild leek, cooling chicory, black pudding purée and crumble, a gravy that tastes like a liquid distillation of roasting pan juices, golden beetroot purée, and slightly acetic mustard seeds.

On to a “crossover” course bridging savoury and sweet, parsnip, my least favourite vegetable, but it wins me over. It’s a parfait of the vegetable quivering between fragile, emollient cocoa butter layers, with honey foam on top, strewn with honeycomb.

All the wild flavours in the honey are captured, harnessed to an amber orangey-ness.

Finally dessert, a ball of heavenly Yorkshire rhubarb parfait flanked by a smaller ball of custard encased in white chocolate wrapped in silver leaf, amidst more rhubarb – poached, dried, a gel – and a sensational rosemary crumble.

As I said, Condita serves a dream of a meal.