Faux-fifties fluff

Number Ten

If you set aside the cash-rich, design-led, deliberately upmarket and unapologetically cool venues, street-trendy style bars are born in areas of urban decay and neglect. Shoreditch was almost a barren wasteland when the bars moved in, long before the developers created their designer lofts. In New York we look to the aesthetically unpleasant meatpacking district for seriously stylish bars, and in Berlin to the postemancipated East with its crumbling warehouses and decadent basements.

Which brings me to Ladbroke Grove, W10, the next upandcoming part of town, apparently. W10 is dangerously near the Neasden area of London, and it sports all the prerequisite characteristics of urban malevolence for it to be on the up --a sprawling Erno Goldfinger socialhousing complex, which includes the Trellick Tower, heavily armoured shop fronts and boardedup windows, and gangs of menacing youths wheeling around on mountain bikes looking ready, willing and able to relieve you of your wallet.

The reincarnation of the former Prince Arthur pub is now complete, and Number 10 is a three-floored, tripartite eating-and-drinking experience with a public bar, a dining room and a private members' bar. The bar is on the ground floor and is decked out in faux Fifties style, with a curved bar and coloured prints of what might be family holidays at Butlins or some such.

Indeed, it looks like a bar you might find at Butlins - there's a dais in the corner, waiting for a band, perhaps (although none materialised on either of my visits), a mish-mash of oldfashioned furniture and a clinically cold atmosphere. The only thing missing from this decor festival of kitsch is a bingo-calling machine in which ping-pong balls fly around a glass case waiting to be picked.

Draught beers are Carling, Cobra, Guinness and Red Stripe, and the bottled beers offer few surprises, apart from Negra Modelo and Negra Especial (fine Mexican beers at £3.25 each), and Breton cider (at £2.80). It lacks the confidence - and, sadly, bartender ability - to be a cocktail bar, and the wine list (three red, three white) is too short to be measurable. The bar opens at 10am for breakfast, serves light and main-course lunches, afternoon teas and an evening barsnack menu or an à la carte offering in the dining room.

I've always said I'd eat my chapeau if I ever came across a Frenchman who couldn't cook a cassoulet, and any hat would have tasted better than the Number 10 cassoulet served with confit duck leg, Cumberland sausage and Gloucester Old Spot roasted pork belly (£13.40). Not for French chef Julien Maissoneuve the slowcookedmarination of ingredients. These were thrown together in the kitchen minutes before arriving at the table. A chicken breast stuffed with cucumber - I kid you not - was ill conceived. The members' bar at the top of the house costs £150 a year to join. It looks like Jack and Vera Duckworth's sitting room on the set of Coronation Street, and it was jam-packed with (very) young kids having a grand old time when I was last there on a Saturday night. If you're looking for a members' bar that is smart and exclusive, then this isn't the place for you.

If this is meant to be a new generation bar for a new generation of drinker, then it does what it says on the tin. But W10, I can tell you, is still waiting for its seminal bar to get the area going. Five out of 10 for effort, though, eight out of 10 for atmosphere (if you're under 23), and one out of 10 for its food-and-drink offering.

10 Golborne Road, W10 (020-8969 8922)

Mon-Sat 10am-midnight, Sun 11am-10.30pm