The catering entrepreneur Clinton Pugh has offered great visual appeal to his customers in all of his bars, cafés and restaurants in Oxford.

This goes back as far as his first operation, Baedekers, in Cornmarket, 21 years ago, where Uruguayan meatballs, a dish I have not sampled since, figured on an eclectic menu. Since then, he has made his mark in such stylish establishments as the Grand Café in High Street, Kazbar in Cowley Road, the now much-lamented Lemon Tree in Woodstock Road and, of course, Café Coco, which faces Kazbar across Dawson Street, presenting me (and I am sure many others), with a which-one? or both? dilemma on a night out.

Well, Coco now has a big brother on the other side of town. Shortly before Christmas, after months of careful design and construction, Clint opened a super new bar and restaurant of the same name on the ground floor of the Royal Oxford Hotel, overlooking Frideswide’s Square, as this lasting memorial to the incompetence of traffic engineers is laughably called.

This is not a location that would greatly tempt a less confident caterer, two previous businesses having already failed there. In 2002, amid much publicity, Stuart Campbell opened Savannah. It closed after 18 months, its prospect of success having been fatally compromised, it seemed to me, by the decision to sell Namibian meat, thereby raising two fingers to local farmers.

Smollensky’s, which followed, hardly packed in the punters either. “Too expensive and not very good” was my verdict in 2006, after paying £93 for a disappointing dinner.

But CoCo is clearly very different. As you can see from the pictures on this page. It has a wonderfully laid back appearance, reminiscent of how Brown’s looked when it opened in 1976 (indeed, how it still looks today). And what it serves scores very highly. I have so far been there four times, twice for drinks and twice more for dinner. The first time was on a Sunday just before Christmas, when I had delicious boquerones (cured anchovy fillets) and melt-in-the-mouth chargrilled tuna, Rosemarie had wild mushroom pâté and a first-class burger (from Clint’s Oxford Organic Burger Company in Cowley Road) and her mother enjoyed a big plateful of the day’s roast beef. The second was a midweek meal last week which I shall proceed to describe.

I started, delightfully, with a bowl of enormous juicy olives, black and green. These aren’t listed on the menu, but do try them; they’re great. There followed mackerel pâté. Though no great fan of this eat-anything, scavenging fish, I do enjoy it served in this way, the smoked fish blended to a smooth and creamy paste, with lemon juice lending a zesty freshness to it. It came with toast rather than the advertised bread (a freshness problem? we wondered) and cornichons.

There were more of these baby gherkins with Rosemarie’s starter of charcuterie, a generous plateful of four Spanish meats, lomo (cured pork loin), Serrano ham, chorizo sausage and salchichon, which is similar to chorizo but without the paprika that gives it its characteristic red hue.

For her main course she chose the home-made fish-cake, possibly because it came with a poached egg, a favourite treat she very sportingly denies herself at home because it is forbidden (or an any rate discouraged) on my diet. The fishcake, smooth-textured save for pieces of onion, also came with green beans and hollandaise sauce.

I tried one of the pasta dishes, chicken tagliatelle. This proved a credit to the kitchen, with big chunks of roast free-range chicken, slices of mushroom and crispy fragments of good smoked bacon in a white wine and cream sauce. The pasta was just as I like, slippery with a touch of ‘bite’ at its centre. I also enjoyed the crunchy salad, featuring beans, barley, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, and well-dressed iceberg lettuce.

I passed on pudding, but was allowed a spoonful or two of Rosemarie’s (or rather chef Johnny’s as the menu styles it) chocolate brownie. Very good.

We shall definitely be back at Coco soon. I particularly want to try the pizzas, which regular visitors have told me are excellent.