Feed your senses

If you have a taste for decadence, you've got to love Hassan Abdullah, Stefan Karlson and Michel Lassere, the 'boys' behind East End fashion and art-world favourite Les Trois Garcons.

If you haven't been, it's a glorious, vaguely disturbing riot of stuffed animals, diamante, crystal chandeliers and old pub. Then they brought us Loungelover, a bar so richly warped that it made the commonplace act of drinking seem as deliciously guilty as sin.

Now they've moved out of the East End's brooding backstreets to the bright lights of the West End and the old RK Stanley's site in Little Portland Street. And, naturally, the scene is as jaw-dropping as you would expect. Coming in out of the cold to Annex 3 (Annex Trois, bien sur) makes the senses reel and the nerves jangle. If you're a Garcons virgin, prepare to be in need of a short lie-down.

Where do I start? With the silver leather banquettes and ravishing - if low-slung - Perspex chairs? Or the glitter walls? Or the chandeliers and light fittings, each one more dazzling than the last? Or the moving Meccano sculpture, vividly lit in its square glass display case? But that's not the half of it.

Everywhere you turn, there's eye candy: punters have dressed to match the decadence and the air is thick with barely contained excitement. The people at the next table chat us up; well, not me they don't. I'm so carried away by the threat of glamour that I've overdone the kohl and a small child tells me I look like Robbie Williams.

Our waiter looks like a young, blond Joe D'Alessandro but he's only one of many entrancing wait-persons wafting round the room. Boys are uniformed; girls are decked out in exuberantly patterned, snakey little dresses by Issa.

You want to know about the food? Really? Baby, food is the last thing I would come here for. Neither the original Trois GarÃons nor Loungelover is acclaimed for the quality of the scoff on offer and, in Annex 3, that trend reaches its apotheosis.

'Our food is aimed at PR girls,' confides one floor walker rather more candidly than the owners might wish. From what we received, I'd infer that this is a breed that doesn't go a bundle on actually eating.

Besides, with the nerve-jangling cacophony of colours, textures and noise (the Robbie Williams effect was exacerbated by the fact that I had to bellow to be heard), the last thing you feel like doing is ingesting. There's an appropriately spare, pared-down menu of vaguely Oriental things: lots of ginger, soy and 'light broths'.

My crab starter - king crab, ginger and apple salad apparently - and the date's foie gras terrine with candied ginger managed a perfectly balanced double act of tasting of precisely nothing at all. Oh, apart from candied ginger. We might as well have been eating polystyrene.