John Lewis has finally revealed its Oxford Street food hall and it is worth a visit.

It’s a little less than a week since John Lewis Oxford Street unveiled a curious hybrid: the “John Lewis food hall from Waitrose”. It is a fairly well-known fact that JLP has two quite discrete elements, department stores and supermarkets, which are run as almost entirely distinct entities.

It is a measure of the degree of separation between the two businesses that their head offices are in different locations and, other than the odd sign stating that they are part of the John Lewis Partnership, to the uninformed eye there is almost no connection between them. Even where their paths do cross a divide is maintained. In the Kingston John Lewis store, there are three floors arranged ziggurat-style around a central void that allows you to stare into the basement – where there is a Waitrose branch.

Although they are in the same building, walking into the Waitrose is tantamount to leaving John Lewis and entering an alternative retail environment. The signage is different, the visual merchandising is what might be described, generously, as minimalist and the staff have that self-selection mentality that characterizes supermarkets, against the do you need any help? ambiance that pervades upstairs.

The Oxford Street food hall is therefore a distinct break with tradition and the signage – somewhere between John Lewis and Waitrose in a space that seems to merge seamlessly from store to supermarket – works very well. The graphics, created by JHP, are low key and tasteful and the 35,000 sq ft (3,250 sq m) area manages to take the best of both parts of the partnership, fusing them to create something new.

Practically, this means that there is a cheese room where experts are on hand to advise you about which kind of Manchega to choose. There are tasting stations where the great middle class can try strawberries dipped in expensive balsamic vinegar and there are fresh food counters with artfully arranged displays of fish, meat and patisseries.

The real point about this addition to John Lewis’s Oxford Street behemoth is that it provides shoppers with a vision of abundance without the excess that seems to mark what has been happening at the Whole Foods emporium in Kensington. Encouragingly, on the day that shoppers were allowed in, it also proved affordable for everybody – and most people were shopping.

The John Lewis food hall from Waitrose gives consumers something genuinely novel when they are done with the haberdashery and hi-fi departments on the store’s upper levels. If only more food retailers could be like this.