Pierre Victoire was once a franchise operation of a restaurant chain that — unusually for a French one — grew out of Edinburgh. It has not been part of that group now for a decade, the company having gone spectacularly bust in 1998 after which its founder Pierre Levicky went to live across the Channel. He returned to Auld Reekie earlier this year and has now begun a more modest catering adventure there with Chez Pierre bistro. Better luck this time, my friend.

In Little Clarendon Street, meanwhile, throughout all this time, Pierre Victoire — as it still remained — went on satisfying the appetites of a large, loyal and ever-growing clientele. Owners Claire Harvey and Gordon Jamieson run what seems to me a model operation, offering good-value, classic dishes at hours highly convenient to its customers — by which I mean long ones.

Theatregoers — and, for that matter, film-goers and concert-goers, too — find particularly appealing its Sunday to Thursday "pre-theatre" (6-7pm) menu and its Monday to Saturday late supper menu (10-11pm). Both are priced at £9.90 for two courses, with coffee too at lunch. Lunch offers starter (calamari or chicken liver parfait, for instance) and main course (warm chicken salad, steak haché or salmon fillet). Dinner is main course (moules frites, pizza, tartiflette au Champignons, the steak and the chicken salad again) and dessert of the day.

Set lunches cost £21 for three courses, selected from the à la carte men (of which more presently) and a good value menu at £5.90 for one course, £7.90 for two and £9.90 for three. Dishes here are approximately the same as the ones already mentioned for the evening cheapies.

Our recent visit was midway through the evening on a Saturday night. A premium time for business, then, and especially with an Oxford full of matriculating students and their proud parents. There was no point, we knew, in arriving ahead of our 9pm table, so we killed time for half an hour in the Eagle and Child, just around the corner. What an excellent pub this is these days: friendly fellow customers, charming and courteous staff (especially the chap who had hair precisely where I have none — a mohican), and dirt cheap wine.

The same combination, the wine excluded, was found as Rosemarie, her mother Olive and I continued to Pierre Victoire where an empty table awaited us on the ground floor. The buzzy atmosphere and decor both set the tone for good eating. The menus having been studied over a glass of wine (decent house champagne for me), the orders were made and food reasonably promptly supplied.

I began with one of the evening's specials offered by chef Pascal Bouchet and his deputy Benjamin Flynn. This was a prettily presented pan-fried fillet of John Dory, with a soft-on-the-tongue citrus polenta and saffron and tomato coulis. Rosemarie had pumpkin soup, another seasonal special, which she found unexciting (isn't it ever?). Olive tried the chicken liver parfait, with red onion marmalade and warm brioche, and was well pleased.

She continued smiling with a main course of confit pork belly , — a splendid chunk of meat on a bed of braised Savoy cabbage with bacon lardons, accompanied by sauteed apples and a rich Calvados-based jus. Rosemarie had that Belgian favourite, moules frites, which brought a large metal container packed with juicy mussels in marinière style with wine, shallots and cream.

I completed the trio of happy customers with a good-sized piece of monkfish, baked in Bayonne ham, then sliced and served with moist pea risotto.

Other dishes on the menu included starters of crab salad, snails, fish soup, and asparagus and mozarella, and main courses of three styles of steak, lamb cannon, pot-roasted rabbit, and buffalo mozzarella with vegetable couscous.

Olive completed her meal with a slice of delicious Bailey's cheesecake with chocolate sauce, while Rosemarie and I shared a plate of St Albray, Roquefort and Camembert cheeses (all in excellent condition), with biscuits, celery and grapes.