The Ten Room at the Café Royal, 68 Regent Street, London W1 (020 7406 3333). Meal for two, including drinks and service £160
It was a simple question, and the waiter flunked it. What type of tuna, I asked, do you use in your tartar? I wanted to know if it was endangered bluefin. "It's from Scotland," he said, with an authoritative nod of the head. My companions and I looked at each other. Scotland? Why? Was it on holiday there? Had it nipped over from the Pacific to get a job in the oil industry? Later the waiter would return to admit his mistake and tell us it was yellowtail from roughly 8,000 miles to the west of Glasgow. By then it was too late. I already hated the Ten Room at the once-grand Café Royal. In truth I had really started hating it when, just after we sat down, the same waiter offered to recommend something from the menu. He then listed half the dishes, including three of the most expensive starters. So, I asked him, what's wrong with the rest of it? He came out with a special rictus grin, muttered: "Nothing" and retreated. If you're going to upsell shamelessly, please do it with style.
When they come to hold an inquest into what has gone wrong here – and they surely will, for a deathly echoing space like this cannot afford to be so empty – the kitchen will, for the most part, be found innocent. The food is not spectacular, but nor is it bad; it's the kind of stuff people who don't look at the bill call comfort food, because it comforts them to eat it.
There's a £12 scallop dish with very little scallop in it. It's amazing how far you can make those suckers go with a sharp knife and a steady hand. There's that tuna tartar and a grilled quail thing with pomegranate to make the kitchen look like it has a bit of Middle Eastern soul. A grilled duck breast for £24 is unevenly cooked: rare as requested at one end, less so at the other – but fine for all that; ditto both a veal chop Holstein, breaded and dressed with a fried egg and anchovies, and a suckling-pig stew. Desserts are better than just OK, especially a warm, soft, spreading chocolate cake and a wobbly custard tart.
The problem is everything else. The space is rather grand – one of those balconied public areas you find in the old art deco hotels of Downtown LA. Into it they have plonked a pile of red leather seats and almost nothing else. It's an airline club-class lounge without the design features or the nibbles. Along one side is a wall of square marble posts, backed by glass. The wall looks like a design feature from a self-consciously modernist men's loo. Frankly I didn't know whether to rest upon it or pee against it. By the end I was sorely tempted.
Off to one side, through a doorway, is a bar so dark you need an iPhone app to read the excruciatingly expensive cocktail list. Music thumps. It continues its muffled thump throughout dinner so that sitting at the table back in the dining area you feel like you're listening to a disco full of young people exchanging rare strains of chlamydia.
Service is silly and pompous and haphazard. I order that suckling-pig stew which, the menu says, comes with crackling. But the crackling doesn't turn up. I have to get the menu back and point it out to the waiter. Don't promise me crackling and then not deliver it.
It's the kind of place where if you decline to have your wine refilled just twice, they'll nick your glass so that you have to ask for it back. Not that you'll be able to afford much to put in it. The cheapest red is £30, and the next cheapest is £40. When the bill comes they ignore the name the booking was made under, presuming they know exactly what I'm doing there, and put my name on it. Only they spell it wrong. And that one detail sums it up. The Ten Room is clumsy, stupid, self-serving and a waste of the once-great Café Royal. It's a crying shame.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
