Robin Gill’s bowls have the heft of holy water founts. The hollowed stones hit the bare wooden tables in his Clapham restaurant with a thump that would be laughable if the food on them wasn’t so good. I’d happily anoint myself with the cream from at least one of the dishes.

Outside The Dairy the trees behind Clapham Common tube station are oily black silhouettes looming out of the frozen fog. It is a monochrome day in London town.

The Dairy has a warm home-hewn feel from the sign outside, all salvaged timbers and ironwork in the shape of two bees and a honeycomb. There are beehives and a small garden on the roof. Inside the ceiling is wallpapered and the walls are distressed as are the cast-iron radiators. Storm lamps hang from the ceilings of the three small rooms that run backwards from the door.

Dubliner Gill and his wife Sarah opened this, their first small place, on St Patrick’s Day 2013. The chef has spent most of his cooking career outside Ireland, in London and Italy. Last year he wrote a moving account in our Food Month magazine of bullying he experienced at the hands of a piratical bunch of chefs. The Dairy and his other London restaurants, he said, are run differently.

Gill has made his name with the quieter ingredients, like the house butter whipped up with bone marrow or whiskey to become a showstopper. He and his team are fanatical about the origin of the cream used to make the butter. Because that matters. We get a fluffy splodge of this better butter smoked and served on a chilled stone with warm nut brown sourdough.

Good milk

This is a restaurant for people who could happily give up meat but know that life is better with good milk. Every dish we eat in the £25 lunch menu has a cream or butter or cheese element. There’s the Baron Bigod, a spoonable luscious raw milk brie made on a Suffolk farm from the still warm milk of the family herd. What’s not to love about a restaurant that serves cheese on toast for a £2 supplement? It’s drizzled with rooftop honey and finished off with a sawdust sprinkling of truffle shavings on the top.

There’s a chicken liver mousse that’s ointment pink and piped into a bowl like Angel Delight. It’s been whipped up with butter and quince (hence the pink) and served with crisp sourdough toasts. A radicchio tart harks back to Gill’s two-star background. The radicchio is pressed so flat on to a biscuity pastry that it looks like prosciutto, its bitterness softened with some Cashel Blue cream and a tangle of fresh diced greens.

Bone marrow agnolotti are small parcels of pasta covered in a woodsy mushroom broth. Each envelope contains a tangy burst of unction, melding marrow and cream to make dreamy magic. Then there’s that ceremonial grey stone bowl which contains a dish I’m still thinking about. I take a picture but it looks like something regurgitated by a toddler. Nothing about the shot gets the flavour of the smoked eel anointed in single cream with tributaries of fermented cabbage green juice veining its way through the milky puddle, like an accident in a milking parlour. There are fresh leaves of hispi cabbage on top sprinkled with furikake, a nutty salty mix of powdered seaweed and sesame seeds. Every texture, temperature and flavour has been thought about in this dish. It is masterful. Pork neck is served luscious with cauliflower and yeast, which features as a warm crust on the oven-roasted florets.

Those nutty comforting themes carry through to the final sweet course with malted barley ice cream, like Horlicks in soft scoop form. Malted is the new salted in desserts. It’s more of a hug than a salty slap in the chops. My miso poached pear comes with a nifty sorrel granite on the top. There are shards of sablé biscuit so thin they’re barely solid but you can still taste the great butter used to make them. They’re dotted into Hurdlebrook ice cream from a Somerset Guernsey herd which is creamier than the head on a vat of Guinness.

Kinder kitchen

There’s a 12.5 per cent service charge on the top of the £25 but our lunch in The Dairy has been proper value. If this is what kinder kitchens produce then bring on a new generation of nice people at the burners.

But there’s another point here. (That scraping sound? It’s my soapbox coming out briefly). Grass fed milk and all its alchemy is the jewel in our food crown and too few Irish chefs take it seriously. The Dairy shows how to wow diners with the ingredients that soggy green islands in northern climes produce so well. Chefs need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the fanatically interested dairy farmers and producers who are holding out against the agri-industry obsession with volume over quality. Then we can keep finding those unique flavours on plates, huge hefty ceremonial ones like Robin Gill or just plain white ones in pubs and restaurants all over the country. And when that happens we’re all blessed.

Lunch for two with a Bellini, a bottle of Hawkes cider and two coffees came to £78.64

Facilities: Homemade vintage chic

Music: As laid back as the place

Wheelchair access: Yes

Provenance: Nearly to the point of a herd number

Vegetarian options: Good in the smaller plates but limited main courses

Verdict: 9/10 Robin Gill's food is a roadmap for thoughtful clever cooks