You can tell that Little Chef has changed before you even open the menu. It’s not the bright new colour, it’s not the famously slimmed-down doughboy silhouette. It’s that it’s not laminated. Does this signal a better quality of customer who knows not to smear fried egg and brown sauce all over it, or will a Little Chef maître d’ whisk your menu away the moment you’ve ordered? And what will that order contain?

The modern obsession with provenance hasn’t escaped Little Chef’s – or Blumenthal’s – notice, but while Ramsay of Carluke, the estimable Scottish butcher that provides the black pudding for the Olympic Breakfast, is a namecheck worth making, Heinz and Häagen-Dazs aren’t usually what we mean by diligent sourcing. Elsewhere the steak is merely from Hereford, the kippers from Scotland, and the Bramley apple pie is only Kentish.

That aside, it all looks like a nudge in the right direction. You can still get monster fry-ups, but we middle classes can now subject our little ones to a gluten-free and sugar-free granola breakfast.

Of course, any fool can write a good-sounding menu. The real test lies in making it taste consistently good from Dover to Dundee. What has played into Blumenthal’s hands is the revived popularity of so many classic British dishes. So he can put a crowd-pleasing prawn cocktail on the menu and we applaud it as ironic retro-chic. Similarly a beer and vegetable casserole, which a few years ago would have sounded dull, dull, dull, now reads like a rediscovery of our regional roots. Given that his lamb cooked in hay has been a mainstay on the Fat Duck menu, I’m surprised he didn’t resurrect that other classic of the decade – chicken in a basket. Now that would have been ironic.

Tony Turnbull is food and drink editor of The Times

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