Doom with a view

Ever felt stiffed? 5th View Bar & Food, we were told. Maybe 5th View Bar & Some Of The Capital's Most Unpalatable Bar Snacks would have left us feeling less stitched up. But that's probably a touch too honest for this new Digby Trout-operated venue at the top of the lovely art-deco Waterstone's on Piccadilly.

It's a long time since I've encountered a meal punctuated by such rampant ineptitude. In a space populated by a number of headless-chicken-impersonating staff, only the manager seemed to have the vaguest notion of what he was doing. I suspect the gig might have been getting to him; not only were his teeth gritted, by the end of the evening, even his hair was clenched.

Watching him trying to orchestrate an at-table vodkatini mixing (why?) provided a tableau of almost Basil Fawlty levels of contained frustration and grinding embarrassment. In the event, my request for "extra dry" meant I got about half a pint of Grey Goose and nothing else. Bottoms up!

The schtick here is a limited menu: couscous, edamame, olives and a selection of "freshly baked tarts". But even this brevity defeated the limitations of the kitchen.

We asked for one of the shared platters of charcuterie and dips to start, followed by a brace of the tarts: tomato and Camembert, and caramelised onions with anchovies.

Well, the tarts arrived. No sign of the starter. I asked for salt and pepper and was presented with the bill - before we'd even put fork to bullet-hard boiled new potato.

I can forgive useless service if the food is great but this was truly grim. The tarts were squares of industrial puff pastry daubed with amateurish ingredients, the first a symphony of watery tomatoes crowned with exhausted Camembert and a single bacon lardon.

The other, a swamp of luridly purple onions, some wizened black olives and the wrong kind of anchovy. This stuff made a West End pizza stand look like a beacon of caring culinary professionalism.

At least we had our starter to look forward to. Olives: greeny-grey, tasting of bad breath. "Houmous": an unlovely paste, chickpea and red pepper apparently, which came across like left-over carrot and potato mash mated with raw garlic and grout. Tzatziki: relatively blameless. And salami cut into thick, impenetrable pucks ("Frisbee!" exclaimed the date) and, like the unfortunate manager, sweating miserably.

This alluring collection came with supermarket pitta. We ventured a few mouthfuls before giving up in astonishment - how do you get something so utterly simple so heroically wrong?