Flickering with vulgarity

The new Casino at The Empire in Leicester Square has been perpetrated by a design group based in Vegas. You don't say. Compared with Sin City's Bellagio or Luxor, this new casino - the largest in London - is moderately restrained, but by British standards it offers up a glittery show of excess so, well, excessive it's likely to bring on a severe dose of culture shock.

And what about Leicester Square itself? It's been years since I've ventured there on a Saturday night and now I remember why.

Rammed with marauding squads of youths, all dressed to slaughter and squawking like exotic parakeets, it makes my head reel. They mill around before piling into the Leicester Square branch of the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse which, with its outdoor tables and parasols, has been cleverly disguised to look like a restaurant.

But, believe me, in comparison with what is to come, this is an oasis of sanity. We walk out of the Square and into a foreign country. One with its own laws requiring you disclose all personal information and have your mugshot taken before you're even allowed to enter; one where the inhabitants are from a nation with the dress code: Make Jordan look shy and retiring.

Every surface is covered with something expensive. Marble is a go-go. Strings of crystal cover walls where fountains leap, sending jets of coloured water into the air. Staircases light up at your approach. The lower floor, where the gaming tables are, is dominated by a chandelier so massively, perfectly hideous it must have cost gazillions.

Everywhere you turn there are bars - thrill to the light-up dance floor in the Shadow Bar - fruit machines, roulette wheels and new technological ways of parting you from your money. All in all, there are more than 4,600 square metres of Mammon worship. The clatter of chips mixes with the soundtrack of Abba and Barry White and the thrum of greed to create an intoxicating clamour.

Upstairs are the restaurants. Pan-Asian offering Fu Lu Shou: never has a name begged so hard for a scatological pun since Brangelina called its offspring Shiloh Pitt. And our destination, Flame, the more upmarket of the two, a cross between a grill and a bit of the old 'fayn dayning'.

From its real fire feature at the entrance to its black, mauve and silver colour scheme to the corsets on the waitresses - one of a whole panoply of extraordinary staff outfits throughout the place - I don't think I've eaten anywhere so magnificently tacky since the late, lamented Pinkies in Margate.

So the food is going to be diabolical, right? Astoundingly, it's not bad. Overblown, tricksy, faux posh-American (maple-glazed beets, cappuccino of crab with lobster biscuit and oyster 'shooter') but, with a few notable exceptions, it's positively bearable.

Meaty tuna 'sashimi' (seared, therefore actually tataki) features decent fish with whipped cream and wasabi 'foam' - er, I don't think so - the obligatory tobiko and a vat of soy. Too-fridge-cold beef carpaccio is topped with lemony lobster in an acceptable play on surf'n'turf.