Scotts
Telephone: 020-7629 5248
Address: 20 Mount Street, London W1
Rating: 14/20

· Open Mon-Sat, 12 noon-11pm; Sun, 12 noon-10pm.

Zuma
Telephone: 020-7584 1010
Address: 5 Raphael Street, London SW7
Rating: 13/20

· Open Lunch, 12 noon-2pm (4pm Sun); dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30-11.30pm.

Sariyer Balik
Telephone: 020-7275 7681
Address: 56 Green Lanes, London N16
Rating: 12/20

· Open 7 days, 5pm-1am. No cards.

The price of wisdom, said the prophet Job, is above rubies. Well, he should have known. And so should I.

In search of wisdom, first I went to Scotts. Scotts has been around so long that the Good Food Guide of 1957/58 quoted with approval the description of a customer: "The very best English food in most comfortable old-fashioned surroundings." The history of Scotts in recent times has not been happy, but it has been taken in hand by new owners and given a lift here and a tuck there. Having had this surgery, it doesn't seem to know quite whether it is splendid institution or novelty turn. The interior retains the handsome architecture, but it has been glossed up with the contemporary designer's box of tricks, complete with plasma screen in the bar. There are waiters dressed in proper waiters' jackets, trousers, shirts and black bow ties, who know how to take a dover sole off the bone, but who also embody the verging-on-surly brusqueness of some Hotel Splendide prototype. And it has a kitchen that does some things very well, but others in a way that calls into question the things done very well.

The things done very well were elvers, simply fried and lightly doused in lemon juice; perfectly poached salmon; scintillating potted shrimps; fine dover sole meunière; and a smile-inducing rhubarb tart. Quite apart from the unexpected joy of finding elvers on a menu at all, the basic fish-cookery techniques were flawless - if you do not believe that there can be a difference between one example of potted shrimps and another (quality of shrimp; ratio of butter to shrimp; discreet use of mace), then you have not lived enough.

Against this must be set a misconceived, too, too solid egg brioche as a base for fresh morels; a chicken and wild mushroom tart from the section of the menu wittily entitled War Rations; fabulously boring broccoli (at £2.50, if you please); salsify fritters, which were as bizarre as they were horrible; a Grand Marnier soufflé that had too much sugar and too little Grand Marnier; and a bill of £122, including a bottle of Meursault at £55 off a boring wine list.

Next stop on the path to illumination was Zuma, at the opposite end of the restaurant Milky Way. It is the epitome of contemporary metropolitan eating: high-concept design (honey-coloured, wood- panelled walls; marble flooring; matt-black piping and aircon ducts overhead); high-octane, high-energy, high-worth, Sex And The City clientele; Japanese food doctored for that crowd; and a bill of £162 for two (£94 after liquid intake).

Now, culinary doctoring can be done with some wit, imagination and good effect - Nobu, for instance, uses Japanese cooking as a springboard for smoothly engineered effects. Zuma keeps closer to the Japanese originals, but serves them up in coarse, vulgarised versions, and when the kitchen departs from the canon of Japanese cooking, it comes up with coarse, vulgar pastiches.

Hence, huge chunks of tofu, turned slimy within a batter sitting in a tasteless liquid, the advertised bonito flakes and grated ginger notable for their reticence; a travesty of nasudengaku; standard-issue organic spare ribs; casual, oafish chicken wings with sea salt and lime; sea urchin sashimi served too cold to be palatable or pleasurable; crude sushi. On the plus side were creditable soft-shell crab with an underpowered wasabi mayonnaise; very fresh steamed clams; and the fact that they didn't charge us for the chicken wings.

OK, I thought, I need to redress the balance. Perhaps wisdom lies in simplicity. Grilled fish, you can't go wrong there. So I went to Sariyer Balik, a Turkish fish restaurant full of nets, in Green Lanes, north London. The last time I ate in Green Lanes, at Cucurova Lahmacun Pide & Kebab Salonu up the road, I had eaten very well. Sadly, that was not my experience at Sariyer Balik. The cold mezze all seemed to have been made with the same yogurt. Admittedly, it was classy stuff, but the different versions, with purslane, courgette and something else I couldn't identify, all tasted the same. The hot mezze - deep-fried mussels, squid ditto and shrimps in a light tomato sauce chirpy with chilli - were rather better.

As I said, Sariyer specialises in grilled fish, and the point about grilled fish lies in the freshness of the fish and the heat of the grill. It pains me to say so, but Sariyer failed on both counts. There were no fresh anchovies. Fair enough. There was no fresh red mullet. Just about tolerable. What there was, was lacklustre turbot, tired tuna and vapid sea bass. Intolerable. Dinner cost a tithe of the meals at the other restaurants - £78 for four - and included two bottles of acceptable wine, beer and coffee, but I had had such high hopes that the place would restore my faith in restaurants. Instead, I went to bed poorer, sadder, and no wiser.