Just St James just about okay

St James's Street is London's new pulsating restaurant artery. It is to food what Bond Street is to designer labels. It is now a brand in itself, as Just St James shows.

Just St James joins some of the most successful restaurants in London - Che, The Avenue, L'Oranger, P?trus - along gastronomy's new golden mile. Like many restaurants in the area, Just St James finds itself in a large, early-20th-century banking premises. It is a great room: marbled and majestic.

Eating in a massively overscaled room somewhere in feel between a cathedral and Grand Central Station is some people's idea of a laugh. However, there are moments when even the most dedicated claustrophobe might feel a little lonely in a room the size of Just St James. Especially if, as when I visited, it was half full.

This was a surprise as I'd had to twist an arm or two to get in. It transpired that, in fact, the management was following a very laudable policy of gently running-in the kitchen and staff by not overburdening them with customers.

The question of how to break in a restaurant has never really been correctly answered. There are two widely practised solutions: charge reduced rates for the first week or two in the hope that customers forgive the glitches in service, or take fewer bookings. Either way, punters will complain; whether it is about kitchen and service still getting its act together or about a 'lack of atmosphere', a euphemism for being thrown back on their own company.

There is a third way: namely, drill the staff until they reach an SAS level of competence and then hold a series of dinners to which regular customers are invited. Staff get the practice; customers feel flattered at being included and asked to eat for free, and what you might lose in a night or two's takings is compensated for by a feeling of goodwill and a chance to iron out any inconsistencies in the service.

Or at least that was what King and Corbin did when they opened J Sheekey; but this is Just St James.

And while J Sheekey comprises a series of intimate little rooms, Just St James is the sort of place where you could park and maintain a commercial aircraft. The impression is of a large international hotel chain crossed with an airport executive lounge. The forepart of the restaurant is strewn with large sofas and low coffee tables. At the back, a mezzanine floor has been installed, accessed by either a staircase or a glass-sided lift.

It does nothing for me and there are bits, like the violently patterned carpet that occasionally alternates with an allegedly decorative stone floor, that I find almost offensive. There is also a glass-walled kitchen, a concept that I feel has passed its sell-by date: not everyone wants to watch their lunch being created from a bunch of dead flesh and root crops.

However, though it looks a bit iffy, it works: apparently, there were two large parties taking place upstairs and my guest and I sat underneath them and did not notice a thing. Mind you, the chairman, who I had decided to take to lunch with me, has an imperturbable demeanour that it would take a lot to disturb. This is a man who has had almost as many triple heart bypasses as I have had fishcakes at Le Caprice - I would think that his blood vessels now resemble something like the wiring diagram of the QE2.