Perfect for non-dieting days

The Landmark Hotel on the Marylebone Road exercises a strange fascination. It sits on the edge of a six-lane superhighway like some luxury mental asylum. I mean no disrespect to the mentally ill, but this brooding, red-brick monolith looks from the outside like a vast, Victorian institution. I cannot understand anyone choosing to book themselves into a place like this, except perhaps by accident, or if a train from the railway station at the back is cancelled. The mystery thickens when it transpires that it has the eponymous and swanky (I use the adjective advisedly) John Burton-Race restaurant.

Burton-Race built up, over at least a decade, a reputation at a hotel called l'Ortolan in Berkshire; it was the sort of place that foodies used to bang on about. Then he set up shop in The Landmark Hotel. I hope a lot of money changed hands because, without a cash incentive, you would have to be a little unhinged to want to set up a first-class, double-deluxe, all-singing, all-dancing, Michelin-starred operation in what is, ostensibly, a gastronomic no-man's-land.

I arrived early for once, and I am glad I had time to look around because the lobby repays careful inspection. Once presumably a courtyard that has since been glassed over, it would not look out of place in Dallas, and is smart in an international way with a sense of scale that is quite pleasing. It functions as a less formal restaurant and is enlivened by the sound of a pianist, who operates from a gallery level.

I went upstairs, attracted by his siren song and the desire to investigate the shops situated up in the gallery. I fell in lust with a blue lightweight Brioni jacket that looked the sort of thing a late-Seventies Bond villain might wear on a sunny day. I would have bought it had the shops not remained resolutely closed.

If the jacket I had admired was late Seventies, then the dining-room was over-decorated late Eighties. My date, a high-ranking and highly chic newspaper executive, had consented to come only if the place had no carpets and no curtains; it actually had the kind of carpet and curtain overload that one seldom saw even in the high summer of ruching and tiebacks.

Sadly, the people are not as overdressed as the d?cor. The dress code seems to be drab affluence, enlivened by a look I can only describe as 'travelling salesman'. I saw a man attired in a suit of slightly shiny, British racing green and a tie that looked as if it had been made out of a scrap of pub carpet.

A visit to the John Burton-Race restaurant begins in a holding area with voluminous sofas that one has to struggle to get out of. If you survive the sofas, you are led to your table. This resembles a little linen-swathed island in an overscaled state room. An attempt to fill up the space is limited to a huge plant pot that rests upon the backs of half a dozen small elephants. It towers up into the middle of the room and, rather in the manner of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, I can imagine it supporting a whole separate ecosystem of dinosaurs.

We ordered. Or at least we tried to order. I found the menu slightly bewildering. It seemed to be composed of a series of set menus, some of which came with the admonition that one must spend a minimum of £50, while others offered three courses for £28, which left me wondering if the remaining 22 quid had to be made up with wine, cognac and cigars.

My guest was having an even tougher time. It was not, she explained, a girls' menu, and any woman concerned about her figure would be hard put to find a calorie-light dish. I tried to assuage her worries with the opinion that calories were the new cocaine. She remained unmoved and pored over things 'poached in cream', 'masked with a delicate herb butter', 'dressed on a mild onion cream', 'bound in mayonnaise', 'topped with a butter of fresh herbs', 'topped with foie gras', or otherwise calorifically turbo-charged. In what seemed an attempt to fatten us up two small trays of canap?s arrived.

My friend opted for an artichoke salad, which she pronounced delicious, although she suspected that the dressing was far from slimming. I had hot smoked salmon 'resting on a bed of marinated choucroute'. It was also nestling under a duvet of some deep-fried, unidentifiable vegetable matter, which seemed otiose since the dish worked perfectly well without it.