Bad taste at Terrace

The last time we ventured into the Connaught, we didn't have a good time of it. Not only did we fail to enjoy our dinner (at Menu, the Angela Hartnett-headed restaurant), but we incurred the wrath of patron Gordon I'm-not-a-celebrity-chef Ramsay.

Toilet paper, he called our illustrious publication, accusing me of being vile to Hartnett because she was female and suggesting that I'd had a fight with my boyfriend on the night in question. Marvellous stuff, broadcast on the telly, thrilled me to the very marrow, and, of course, complete bollocks.

So, on hearing about the opening of Angela Hartnett's Terrace restaurant, as the press release put it, I felt it only fair to give the Connaught a return visit. And how I wanted to like it: for one thing, I wanted to come across as the truly fair and even-handed reviewer I am, no axes to grind here; for another, I wanted to avoid further winding up one of the capital's most influential food figures. Sadly, I didn't like it at all.

The description 'cool white canopy, opaque glass floor tiles and pale green wrought-iron tables and chairs' led me to expect something pretty. Wrong. It's a very functional add-on to the front of the hotel, a kind of austere conservatory on to the street; the floor tiles are already cracked and the furniture is just weird, the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a Worksop branch of the Travel Inn - only its weight led us to realise it wasn't avocado plastic. Tables for two are minuscule. The whole thing made us feel as though we were on a package holiday where a full-board deal had compelled us to eat at the rather dismal hotel.

Exemplary service is a feature of the Connaught, but I reckon the staff at the Terrace were tyros in training, so many solecisms were committed.

I had to stand aside while a female staff member swept imperiously past me; our waiter seemed intrusively interested in our topics of conversation; the same waiter placed my knife and fork on the table by standing behind me and
placing them over each shoulder (truly bizarre). Our other waiter knew nothing about anything; any requests were met with Manuel-like blankness.

OK, so it's a diffusion number, a lot cheaper than the main event. But, with the likes of rosemary-roasted chicken at £14 and pan-fried skate with black butter at £16, it's not what you'd call a steal. And, whatever the level, this kind of ineptitude just isn't acceptable.

We hoped the food would cheer us up. Certainly, the menu is attractive with a collection of nice, easy things you really want to eat: pastas, egg dishes, simple grills. So not brain surgery. Sadly, nor was it particularly good. Things started off well with a basket of delicious carta di musica, that poppadom-like Sardinian bread, and splendid parmesan grissini.

Starters were fine: coppa (a pungent ham salami) had been fried with a couple of perky, sunshineyellow eggs, a pleasant, Atkinsfriendly plateful; smoked haddock and watercress was flavour-packed into good shortcrust pastry, a reasonable tartlet that lacked a truly seductive eggy wobble.

But mains were woeful: a tangle of ultra-thin calamari rings was served tepid, they'd been over-fried into salty crisps; we might as well have been eating a plate of Pringles. The meat for a hamburger had been processed so thoroughly it was almost liquidised: a horrid texture, reminiscent of what is usually found under golden arches. It sat on a damp pool of mayo-sodden, flaccid coleslaw. After this little lot, we had no desire for any puddings.