Rating 5/10

Telephone 020-7831 9399
Address 167 Drury Lane, London WC2.
Open Mon-Sat, lunch noon-3pm, dinner 5.30-11.30pm.
Price £50-60 a head for three courses with wine.

If the London branch of the CIA hasn't finalised its Christmas lunch plans, I have a venue. Its name is Tamarai, which is Tamil for lotus, and it is the weirdest restaurant I've encountered since a trip years ago to a place in east London where we sat in a giant amphora staring at a twist on a Michelangelo classic in which David was outlandishly tumescent.

I recommend Tamarai not so much because the agents will enjoy the pan-Asian cuisine (good in patches though that was), but in the hope that it will offer inspiration about how to disorientate suspects to breaking point without resorting to electrodes. The plan is this: bring them to this underground room for a few hours and hustle them back up to the street without any re-conditioning period, and they won't know whether they're Chemical Ali or Chemical Sally. They'll spill every last bean without a single volt passing through their orchestras.

Speaking as the first lunch customer ever - the sort of milestone I'd always assumed would be greeted by klaxons, glittery paper falling from the ceiling and a presentation by Kerry Katona, but in fact was marked by lots of chaps staring at a site map and someone mooching around with a mop - the thing about Tamarai is this: in every regard other than the serving of food, it is ostentatiously a nightclub, which makes a daytime meal a thoroughly disconcerting event.

"This is bizarre," said my friend when he became the second luncher in Tamarai history, squinting through the enveloping dismal gloom abated less by the glimmer from an antique chandelier than by the interrogation spotlight targeting our faces. Somewhere yonder to the west, we could make out a long, sweeping bar and a dance area, while opposite each of us were aeroplane-seat TV screens showing CGI cartoon images of metamorphosing lotus flowers and lily pads. Chuck in R&B blasting through a nearby speaker, and there seemed no choice, when asked if I wanted anything to go with the water, but to request a tablet of finest ecstasy.

"This is very, very bizarre," reiterated my friend as the owner came over to welcome us, reporting his own doubts as to whether lunchtime opening was a sound idea, and also that his wife was "very angry with me for this". Then Manish the chef popped along to take us through a menu that insists he has travelled throughout Asia learning new tricks.

Any chef who tries to cover an entire continent is asking for trouble - such menus should always come stamped with the warning HazPan - but Manish just about gets away with it. His dim sum were sometimes eccentric (spring rolls filled with melted cheese and corn) but conventional steamed dumpling dishes such as shrimp and water chestnut were fresh, juicy and delicious.

A pair of salads - served like everything else on strange, curvy plates hinting at a gynaecological examination (I'm guessing here) - were poor, fried vegetables coated with palm sugar and with the texture and flavour of tomato sauce crisps, and gado gado with fish that was spongy and vapid. But the main courses - barramundi fillets with shiitake mushrooms and crispy basil and, from Manish's homeland, "rock salt curried lamb chop" with a brandy snap-style masala - were fine. The pick of the bunch, served as a first-day gift, was an absolutely brilliant giant prawn, caramelised and infused with Szechuan spices.

The service was willing if no less perplexed than we were, the winelist, put together by the wine writer Tim Atkin, is unusually good and, all in all, the place has some good things going for it, even if, much like the scattergun menu, it seems to have little idea about its target audience.

Thankfully I do, and cannot commend it to the CIA enough. When finally we climbed back to street level, the daylight, air and dearth of mutating lotuses overwhelmed us. We swayed on Drury Lane, clinging to each other like drunken queens on a dance floor, ready to sing like canaries without so much as the hint of a Syrian torturer.