Boring at the Bridge

Calling round for a last minute table recently I stumbled across so many disasters and spooky goings-on in restaurants all over town that I suspected supernatural forces at play.

In the Lecture Room at Sketch a glass ceiling had cracked, flooding the £200-a-head dining room, and Momo, the patron saint of naughty nocturnal people, was turning away a fully booked dining room. Tom Aikens was closed due to a gas leak. Locatelli's was mysteriously locked and nobody home. A Shetland pony-man of the apocalypse was trotting through town intent on spoiling my plans.

I took a couple of siblings and a sibling's new boyfriend to The Bridge House Bar And Dining Rooms on the south side of Tower Bridge. Amy thought it was like the cafe at a smart but not trendy gym - her new boy mentioned Starbucks. I thought it had the sort of smartness - blando carpet, glossy blonde wood, a feature made of a piece of rusty shipyard metal hung on the wall - that Alan Partridge would appreciate in a regional chain hotel lounge. Ben said it reminded him of the cafes at Disneyland.

'Disneyland?!' I howled. 'I never knew you were terminally ill.' The rest of us poor Spicer kids had to be content with an annual trip to Alton Towers. Ben had not only been to Disneyland, but eaten something other than own-brand crisps and cheese sandwiches from an old icecream tub. Why? 'It was only Disneyland Paris,' he said defensively. The damage was done, the unfair treatment of siblings was out and I think you get a picture of what a peculiarly bland space we were sitting in.

Surprisingly, the Bridge is not part of a chain. It is owned by Wayne Seddon, who is also head chef, and Steve McMinn, both formerly of the Bleeding Heart Tavern.

I have never eaten at the BHT but it has a reputation sufficient to compound the shock at how ineffably dull the food was at the Bridge.

Not that it's bad at the Bridge Tavern, not by a long way, but you can eat better at Cafe Rouge. There are gastro-pub standards on the menu: sausage and mash, fishcakes et al. The starters included wan-tasting smoked salmon which came strewn with roseberries, red peppercorns, sundried tomato and capers so that it looked, and in some respects tasted, like someone had scattered pot pouri on it. Chicken liver and brandy parfait with roasted onion jam was fine, but too mono-tasting to really charm, the jam was not cooked long enough to have that delicious sweet, sticky onion jamminess. A smoked mackerel pate was perfectly nice in a Tesco's Finest range sort of a way. The duck breast starter was somewhat dry.

Everything was OK. Just, OK. OK is hard to write about, and forgettable to eat. I've seen some good write-ups on this place and I was paranoid that I was having a bad hair day. 'This isn't much cop this food, is it?' 'No.' 'No.' And 'No,' said my dining companions.

The best thing about the mains were the fat chips, which would have been great had the fat they were fried in not had a mild polyester quality to it.

My fishcakes looked like fishcakes and had a fishy quality I suppose. Ben's veggie choice, mushroom, plum tomato and artichoke tart was so innocuous that he actually said halfway through it, 'What am I eating again?' Amy's new boyfriend was polite as I asked how his steak was. 'It's tender,' he said, cautiously. 'But it doesn't have much flavour.'