A nuevo disaster

It was called a fritura de langosta. It was described as 'seared lobster corn cakes, mix green salad with walnut and pear vinaigrette'. And it tasted like nothing on Earth.

Oh, all right then I'll give it a bash: imagine soaking Cornflakes for days in cheap salad dressing until they became a mush. Squish them together to form a dense paste and stir in the contents of stale spring roll and some salmon paste from a jar. Then form into fat, limp sausages and fry in elderly oil. I'm not sure even that approximation does its spectacular vileness real justice.

This was the worst thing we ate at Cube & Star but the rest of our dinner went no way towards exonerating that astonishing crime against a starter. This, we're told, is 'Nuevo Latino' cooking, a partnership of European ingredients and South American flavours and cooking methods. (Although, in reality, it just came across as a lot of faffing about with black beans, heart of palm, plantain, coconut and sweet potato - not desperately European, I think you'll agree.)

Apparently, Nuevo Latino has gone down a storm in the States and, er, Dubai, where Cube & Star's owner Mark Turner and head chef Gustavo Agreda ran a bar and restaurant 'concept', regularly voted in the top five in town. All I can say is that information has put me off ever wanting to visit that most footballers' wife-ish destination once and for all.

Take the paella, for instance. In a magnificent piece of hedge-betting, it is described as 'traditional Cube & Star paella with home-made chorizo'. Since Cube & Star has been open only about five minutes, that can mean anything they like.

So we get a crash collision of longgrain (not paella) rice that appeared to have been introduced to the rest of its ingredients - weaselly chicken, overcooked mussel and minuscule nuggets of spammily flaccid chorizo - only moments before serving. If that was home-made, I'll stick to shop-bought. The overwhelming flavour was an astringent one - maybe coriander and turmeric -not the subtle fragrance of saffron.

Then there were 'three potato cakes' - the titular tubers being one regular, one sweet and one a disturbing blue. These had been formed into golf ball-sized cakes and fried: not one had been cooked properly. The conventional job was raw, the sweet almost liquid and the blue had spread its stain over the surface like a bruise. In appearance, they were so alarming, so horror B-movie, I almost expected them to pulsate.

Some things weren't actively nasty, just not very good: empanadas (stuffed pastries) were clumsy, Cornish pasty affairs. 'Carne asada al tobacco leaves' was an interesting concept. 'How do they do that?' I asked our lovely little waitress (is it a sign of age when waitstaff start to look about 12?).

'They take apart cigars and cook them together with the steak on the chargrill.' Really? Smoking and red meat in one fabulously politically incorrect package? Bring it on, I say. But it was dull: good meat (fillet) overcooked, with pedestrian grilled veg - unskinned peppers, oily aubergine - and the faintest whiff of the ashtray. Puddings were forgettable: so I've forgotten them.

Cube & Star used to be the seminal Shoreditch Electricity Showrooms, the torch-carrier for the fleeting ultra-grooviness of that fin-infested part of London. And its arrival signals the last gasps of an edgy location.