Oslo Court, Charlbert Street, London

Remember the expression of dawning disbelief on John Simm's face in Life on Mars when he came round from his coma to find he'd been transported back to 1973? Well that's how my guests looked as they walked into the all-pink dining room of Oslo Court. "When you said retro, I thought it would be a Seventies-themed style bar," one of them gasped. Oh no, my friends, oh no. Oslo Court isn't retro in the sense of deliberately setting out to recreate the past. At Oslo Court, the past never went away.

Here, in an anonymous apartment block just north of Regent's Park, is a perfect time capsule of Seventies dining. Here are dishes that haven't been seen on any menu, anywhere, since Abigail laid out the nibbles for her fateful party. Here are pink grapefruit grilled with brown sugar, salmon en croute, steak Diane, beef Wellington and – yes! – a dessert trolley. Here, too, are proper waiters of the old school, who ensure that lady diners are given a slightly higher seat than the gents and a menu without prices.

Though I've lived round the corner from Oslo Court for nearly 15 years, and heard of its legendary old-school charms, I've never felt the need to visit. And boy, have I been missing out! This isn't just a restaurant, it's an experience.

The ruched and swagged dining room, Neapolitan pink from its sponged walls to its velvet bucket chairs, is carbon-datable to the early 1980s. The clientele, by and large, are of a much earlier vintage, though there are a surprising number of family groups and youngish couples. And the food – ah, the food – is the stuff that those of us who grew up in the 1970s cut our restaurant teeth on. You could call it Modern European, if Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World constituted your idea of modern European.

From the garlic bread, melba toast and crudités with garlic dip that open proceedings to the foil-wrapped mint at the end, this is a dining experience that owes nothing to fashion, and everything to customer satisfaction. The huge laminated menu is an international round-up of forgotten treasures from an era when nouvelle cuisine was just an absurd rumour, and eating out meant beef, chicken, lamb or fish, preferably in some kind of cream-based sauce.

Take my starter, crab à La Rochelle, a pastry parcel filled with white crab and mushrooms and served in a brandy sauce, a dish so vast and rich that it implied a certain symbiosis between the restaurant and the area's many excellent private hospitals. Fried whitebait – upgraded by the charming touchy-feely manageress to include scampi and calamari rings – was heavier on the batter than the crisply rustling shoal of sacred Berni Inns memory. But seafood salad was a perfect recreation of the days when salad meant tomato and cucumber rather than rocket and goat's cheese.

Brilliantly staying within the Seventies, our waiter used a battery-operated Handi-Vac to de-crumb our table between courses, leading us to hope that a heated hostess trolley might be brought into play for the mains. But the dishes themselves were nostalgia enough. Who could resist the once ubiquitous combination of duck and cherry sauce? Oslo Court's version, a confited duckling, spatchcocked and roasted until crisp, was fantastic. Beef Wellington, too, was also worth the revisit, a good piece of beef fillet, pink at its centre and swaddled in its comfort blanket of puff pastry.

It's a mystery why either of these dishes ever slipped off our menus. Less so steak Diane, an entirely brown plateful of soft meat and sludgy, caramelised onion sauce that was rather too vivid an evocation of the old days.

There's something very relaxing about Oslo Court, though, and our group softened into a mood of benign hilarity, perhaps because of the illusion that we'd been transported back to our own childhoods, only with halogen lighting and chip-and-pin technology. The restaurant's atmosphere is truly extraordinary; this much table-hopping and general air of back-slapping enjoyment is seldom seen outside The Wolseley. And The Wolseley's waiters don't dim the lights and sing Happy Birthday when they bring out birthday cakes, as happened five times over the course of the evening.

Nor do you get a floorshow of the kind put on by the dessert waiter, who talks you through his trolley with an array of camp asides that brings to mind the late Larry Grayson. "I'll bring you the pear tart, it's much better," he confided, when someone tried to order lemon cheesecake. He's been with Oslo Court for more than 20 years, as have many of the staff.

The bill, when it comes, is also comparable with the Wolseley – with wine and aperitifs, four of us paid £280. But we felt like we'd had a time-travel experience thrown in for the price of our dinner. "That was one of the nicest meals I've had in years," said the most cynical of my guests. And did I imagine it, or was there a hint of sadness in his voice?

Oslo Court, Charlbert Street, London NW8 (020-7722 8795)

Food
Ambience
Service

£40.50 each for three-course dinner

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