41 High Street, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Middlesex (020 8426 6767). Meal for two, including wine and service, £120

There are great dish ideas. There are bad dish ideas. And then there are some that fall under the heading: "What the hell were they thinking?" The crab risotto with passion-fruit sorbet at Incanto is definitely one of those. That's why I ordered it. If a restaurant puts a dish on the menu that sounds like the kind of thing someone thought up during a weekend on crystal meth, then I know what I have to do. I have to take one for the team.

It's a shame. Obviously, it's always a shame when good ingredients get wasted in the service of what some might call innovation and others sheer lunacy. In this case, it is even more so. I have known about Incanto, amid the village kitsch of Harrow-on-the-Hill, for some time. I grew up in Harrow and it's where my dad still lives. A number of people had suggested I visit the restaurant and I'd resisted out of a fear of parochialism. If growing up is about leaving home and finding the big wide world, the notion I might find something exceptional back where I started didn't make sense. But then I got yet another recommendation and decided to ignore my suspicions.

The disappointment with Incanto, which classes itself as an Italian, is that there is clearly someone in the kitchen who can cook. The basics are there. They know how to roast meats, bake great breads, knock up a soufflé and so on. There were lovely smoked olives on the table. A starter of light ravioli with a liquid duck-egg-yolk centre – tricky to pull off – came with bacon and wild mushroom, and was exemplary.

But on top of that is something else, which they no doubt would call creativity and I would class as desperation. The food resembled the dishes in the latter stages of MasterChef, when wet-lipped competitors are screaming "Feel my passion!" and have completely lost the plot. The stock base for that crab risotto was good, but the only thing it had to say to a scoop of passion fruit sorbet was: "Please go away." It didn't help that the texture was all wrong, the grains just simply undercooked.

Both main courses were served on big square flat plates, which may explain the lack of useful saucing. It would have dribbled off on to my lap. No matter, there were lots of other things. A venison dish had smears of sauces painted on to the plate like skid marks, which added no flavour or lubrication. The slices of venison fillet were nicely done, as was the round of shin, braised like an osso bucco. The rest was knobbly clutter. A "venison grissini" was a dry stick made of breaded meat. A deep-fried potato nest filled with a potato foam was just plain silly. A lamb dish was the same – great lamb, then strange smears and piles and baked things and squiggly things. A beetroot tatin was just a disc of dry pastry with slices of beetroot on top. Still, it was very crimson and that, I suspect, was the point. This was presentation with a capital P. It was "art". It was "drama". It was profoundly irritating. I ordered some truffle and parmesan thick-cut chips, hoping they might provide light relief. They were undercooked, dry and heavy and entirely lacking in truffle. We ate half of one and left the rest. To their credit they took them off the bill, unasked.

A pistachio soufflé did give light relief for being just that. But an overset orange panna cotta, with a chocolate ganache and a whole bunch of other things besides was so much more of the same. There is no excuse for putting rosemary and chilli in a tuile. In fact I'd go so far as to describe it as bad manners.

Incanto is an attractive space, with bare-wood beams and skylights and a deli at the front that looks rather pleasing. The staff are attentive if a little off the ball (almost every dish was offered to the wrong person). It could be a lovely restaurant, if everybody behind the kitchen door just learned to calm down. Right now a meal there feels like something to be endured. As Greg Wallace has probably already said, eating doesn't get tougher than this.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place