Telephone: 020-8299 9788
Address: Gallery Road, Dulwich Village, London SE21
Rating: 13/20

Belair House is one of those handsome Georgian buildings that star in TV costume dramas. It is set back from the road in Dulwich, south-east London, behind tall hedges and with a drive that sweeps up to the porticoed front door. It is set in what looks like leafy parkland. Outwardly it speaks of grace, style and a certain income. Inwardly? Ah, well, inwardly...

"It reminds me of a gynaecologist's waiting room in St John's Wood," said Carstairs. She seemed to speak from personal experience. It's true, the room had something of a clinical feel. The light poured in through the tall windows on to the daffodil-yellow walls. The high ceilings encouraged the kind of polite hush that settles in waiting rooms. But it was more than that. There was something about the vases of flowers, the dead weight of the furniture, the anaesthetic quality of the pictures, that wrapped us in a kind of sterile charm. Although tasteful, it was all rather old-fashioned.

The menu kept up the theme, what with smoked salmon terrine (albeit with "Caspian cream and caviar dressing"), baked goat's cheese with courgettes and puff pastry (albeit in a very today tower), and aumônière of wild mushrooms and spinach. (Just in case you'd forgotten, or aren't old enough to remember, aumônière is French for a moneybag, because it looks like one of those fat, medieval purses. The last time I saw one was in the Take Six Cooks series back in the 1980s.)

Carstairs was so intrigued by the aumônière that she ordered it, and the smoked salmon terrine before. I decided to give the goat's cheese a chance to redeem the reputation of this much put-upon ingredient, which seems to be almost every chef's weapon of choice in their war with vegetarians. To redress the balance, I also fancied fillets of lamb with spiced pumpkin purée and green beans. So off we went, tripping down memory lane, merry as grigs. Well, that was the idea.

I have a fondness for the dishes of former times. They evoke cheery hours spent at the table that I had long forgotten. Proust's madeleine can come in many disguises. It could even come in the guise of that staple of the cutting-edge dinner table of the 1960s - or was it the 1970s? - the smoked salmon terrine. But not in the form that it took at Belair House. It looked handsome enough: decorous slices of pink salmon, bound with what looked very much like Polyfilla and tasted like solidified toothpaste. The caviar was more notional that actual, and there was a thicket of irrelevant frisée.

The reputation of baked goat's cheese remained unredeemed. If only it had eaten as well as it looked. Fat pucks of compacted cheese rose up and up on discs of pastry that were crisp as hardtack, rather than airy as thistledown. It was saved from inedibility by a dyke of sweet onion jam that held a lake of fine olive oil and the odd splash of balsamic vinegar. The lamb, thank the lord, was substantially better. In fact, the meat - four separate strands cooked to form a single fat trunk - was really very good, thoroughly and justly flavoured. The gravy was the real thing, too. But the spiced pumpkin purée, a good idea, was thick as paste, and the little faggot of squeaky French beans brought a wave of nostalgia for 1970s plate art gushing over me.

So we come to the aumônière, which immediately reminded me why the vogue for it passed so rapidly. The trouble with aumônière is that, to get the walls sufficiently strong to hold the filling, you have make the pancake, of which it is made, sufficiently thick - and there's nothing on earth that will stop thick pancake from clagging up your mouth. Carstairs put down her fork with some finality, much of the mushroom and spinach sack still on her plate.

We also shared a slice of lemon tart, which I will pass over in silence. The bill was £88.20 - £40 on food and £42.30 on wine, for which we got six glasses, including two of champagne at £8.60 off a fatuously priced list. This is on the steep side, in my book, particularly for the dubiously exhumed gastro-hits of yesteryear.

· Open Lunch, Mon-Sun, 12 noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 7-10.30pm. Menus: Lunch, Mon-Sat, £18 for two courses, £22 for three (Sun lunch, £27 for three courses).