Menu makeover at Great Eastern

It must be so exhausting to be truly fashionable. Not that I'd know. Years ago, I decided on a look and have stuck to it ever since, reasoning that even if most of the time I'm dismissed as a harmless eccentric, every few years I'm bang on the money.

In fashionable Shoreditch (it is still fashionable, isn't it, you groovy dudes out there? Or is the centre of the cool universe now somewhere like Tottenham?), it's not enough for the inhabitants to walk the cutting edge, the restaurants have to knuckle under to fashion's tyranny, too. So The Great Eastern Dining Room, which until recently was puttering along quite nicely with a contemporary Italian menu, has undergone a culinary rethink and is now what I suppose could be described as contemporary Oriental.

Perhaps it was done out of a desire to assuage that hunger for innovation that's a hallmark of our millennial consumer society. Or perhaps it was because owner Will Ricker's other restaurant, E&O, has been a rave with Notting Hill-ites and celebs since it opened its doors last year with an almost identical menu; one which looks as though it's been devised by someone who's spent a lot of time lurking about Nobu and Hakkasan.

The welcome is charming and attitude-free. I was lulled by this friendliness into accepting the offer of a plate of edamame - those savoury, podded soybeans - to accompany my delicious rhubarb martini while I waited for my date. I was less happy when they turned up on the bill at the end of the meal. I felt this was a cynical bill-bumping exercise masquerading as hospitality and it made me rather cross, especially since I'd never order them in the natural scheme of things (£2.50 for a bunch of cold, salty pea-thingies? No ta.) I mean, £2.50 times the number of diners per evening adds up to, ooooh, quite a lot of revenue in soybeans alone.

Still, the food was mostly fair to acceptable in a slightly sanitised, Japanese-meets-Chinese-meets-Thai kind of way. Chilli salt squid was a splendid version of this Chinese classic: wafer thin, lacily crispy and tender, with the sinus-clearing fire of bird's-eye chilli.

Crispy fried fish wasn't. But the chunks of salmon and white fish - cod? - were well-cooked and draped in a dayglo orange sweet-sour sauce that, when eaten with the other components of lime, chilli and mint, gave a flavour like a collision between Vietnamese and suburban Chinese takeaway.

We had a very Nobu-ish dish of white Albacore tuna in a pool of citrussy soy. This had achieved a cooked, almost spongy texture from its marinade and was rather disturbingly tepid, fleshy and uniformly shaped, like it had been extruded from a machine. A warmly recommended salad of caramelised pork with baby cucumbers sang out with the now familiar mix of mint, chilli and lime; the flavours were good but the meat was chewily impenetrable.

Rock shrimp tempura - another Nobu stalwart - with ponzu dressing and a kind of spicy Thousand Island was a flannelly, unmemorable dish, the kind of thing you forget you've eaten almost instantly. Starters are around the £6 mark, mains about £11.

Thankfully, the decor hasn't altered to reflect the new flavour. It's still a great urban space, blissfully free from frou-frou and tarting up - apart from some gorgeously pyrotechniclooking light fittings. Tables are simply set, colours are deep and moody and they've done that smart thing of covering a wall with a large slanting mirror so that nobody misses out on the people-watching that's such a preoccupation in this part of the world. At least as far as this is concerned, they've adhered to the don't-fix-it-if-it-ain't-broke philosophy, and changing the whole look of a restaurant to embrace this year's model would be taking things too far. Or would it? Watch that space.

Great Eastern Dining Room
Great Eastern Street, London, EC2A 3QR