Altitude highs and lows

As regular readers of this newspaper will know, I'm one of life's optimists, always determined to find a silver lining in even the darkest cloud. Which is why on 11 September, hours after the horrendous events in New York had unfolded, I decided to lift global morale by faxing the following message to the manager of the Central Plaza in Hong Kong.

"Sir, due to the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center (heights 417 and 415 metres), I am pleased to inform you that your Central Plaza (height 374 metres) is no longer the world's eighth-tallest building, but the sixth-tallest.

Congratulations on your promotion." And do you know what? The miserable sod never even sent a thank-you letter in reply. Sometimes I don't know why I bother, really I don't.

My old mate, the late great Peter Langan, was the first person to advise me of the link between tall buildings and poor service, warning "never eat in a restaurant where the main boast is the panoramic view".

I was working for the BBC at the time, so I invited him to the 15th floor of Saint Georges Hotel to put his theory to the test, and he was right: the view (mainly of the Woman's Hour dykes on the roof of nearby Broadcasting House) was spectacular, but the food and the ambience were terrible.

Things got worse in the Nineties, when they added pomposity and absurd cloches to gastronomic mediocrity, and even demanded that all male diners must wear a tie, thus forcing you to garrotte the very tube down which the food passes. So I was pleasantly surprised when I visited it recently to discover that nowadays only the menu wears a Thai.

At first sight, the interior looked not merely sparse but gutted, as though the council had just been in and stripped the place of all fixtures and fittings. Everything seemed laminated, too, from the cheap plastic menus to the enormous wipe-down melamine ash veneer table at which the two of us were seated, port-ending a dining experience about as intimate as a Nuremberg rally.

The lavatories were the Heights of bad taste (cracking soft wood timber over tiles), and made the Black Hole of Calcutta seem positively sumptuous, while the background din was hellish, as though someone from the BBC sound-effects department was playing "noisy bar" through the loudspeakers.

And looking around, I realised that this wasn't so much a restaurant as a student haunt for young professionals who've been kicked out of the university of life, and now come here to drink a consoling piña colada, while staring vacantly into the blackness of west London.

However, some of the oriental cuisine that's served here is as good as the street food I've sampled in Bangkok (and that's meant as a compliment). The waiter suggested spiced chicken tossed with yoghurt, curry leaves, cucumber, and onion salad, and I'm glad he did, because the meat was first-class, while the coconut was moist and chewy, like little Chicklet macaroons.