A bowl full of fun food

The last time I was in a bowling alley was in Margate. The vast, underpopulated space was painted an evocative shade of bad-teeth brown; it smelled of damp, fag ash and despair. The idea of inserting my tootsies into one of the disturbingly squidgy bowling shoes filled me with panic and a touch of the dry heaves.

Now I'm in an entirely different bowling universe. This, the second All Star Lanes (the first, hugely successful one is in Bloomsbury), is as far removed from that Margate hellhole as Prada is from Primark. Hell, even the shoes, flat and funky, are desirable.

We're here to review the restaurant but it would be churlish not to knock down a few pins. Or, in my case, watch as my bowling ball is sucked inexorably into the gutter, time and time again. Maybe it's just bad co-ordination, maybe it's something to do with the cocktail list.

There's a cocktail fairy, a cute gal, American-diner clad and Slav-accented, who appears out of nowhere with a succession of rather fab drinkies, such as an addictive pomegranate margarita. Perhaps that's why our bill for the evening winds up at more than £145. Like I say, we're not in Margate any more.

Everything about the place reeks of investment: the sleek bowling lanes with state-of-the-art equipment; the chichi diner-style restaurant; the genuinely glamorous cocktail bar, crammed with glinting bottles of posh American hooch.

We brave some fierce-looking door gorillas to get in; yeah, right, like it's going to be that busy on a Tuesday night. But the joint is heaving with an upmarket crowd: artfully scruffy cool kids rubbing shoulders with a designer suit-clad works-outing brigade. Jason Donovan is there, tucking into his dinner.

We ask our charming Irish host, Andy Smyth, how come it's so mobbed. Turns out I've totally missed a ten-page spread in Hello! magazine, featuring All Star Lanes, and starring Jason's ex, Kylie, Richard Branson and various other fairly A-list slebs. (As an aside, when I get a hold of a copy, I'm astonished at Kylie.

I know it's a mortal sin to cast the teeniest aspersion on the holy sainted Minogue but I do think she needs to lay off whatever anti-wrinkle treatment she's on - I'm not saying Botox, OK - before she ends up looking like an egg with teeth.)

We choose the bowl first, eat later option. You don't need to hear about my humiliation; suffice to say it worked up enough of a hunger to make us want to plunge into the menu's bigger choices rather than, say, a delicate little hamburger or a restrained meatball hoagie.

I ask our slightly harassed waitress if we can taste the mac and cheese - I don't want a steaming great bowlful but it's a good litmus test of any American-themed restaurant. The weeny ramekin that returns doesn't augur well: rather than an unctuous, creamy baked dish, we get rigatoni slathered in butter and melted, soapy cheddar.