QC proves a shining example

Attached to the formidably named Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel, it's the former banking hall of a truly imposing edifice, built in 1912 as the headquarters of Pearl Assurance: a playing field expanse of columns, marble, long glass bars, serried ranks of bar stools and gigantic, marbled dish-shaped deco lampshades.

Massive in scale, with its Alice In Wonderland oversized leather sofas and strange cubicle arrangements of glass screens sprouting chrome uplighters - an annoying feature, as I always want to check out my fellow diners as thoroughly as possible - it certainly makes a big impression. Whether good or bad led to some debate between me and my dates.

'It's like a building society trying to do trendy,' said one. 'It's like a really posh hotel in somewhere like Krakow,' mused another. What, in fact, it was most like was a kind of post-modern version of The Overlook from The Shining; it wouldn't have surprised us to catch sight of ghostly barmen or a deranged Jack Nicholson shambling down the red-carpeted-stairway to the misleadingly signposted lavs.

This impression was heightened by the lack of custom, the preponderance of solitary diners and the strange, gloomy lighting - despite all the fittings and uplighters.

Given all this, the quality of our food was even more of a revelation. Head chef is Jun Tanaka, whose cooking at Chives in Fulham garnered well-deserved plaudits. If anything, it's even better here. Conceits such as macaroni of king prawns with fresh herbs - in reality, prawns perched on the kind of tiny pasta that Italians feed their children - worked excellently.

Crisp wild mushroom risotto turned out to be a cricket ballsized blob of wellcooked, full-flavoured rice, deep-fried until it unsettlingly resembled a Scotch egg, and set on a frothy, creamy sauce of ceps; it was surprisingly good.

Best of the starters was slithery, charred and melting foie gras nestling between sheets of fine, silky pasta on a very butch reduction flavoured with red wine, onions and bacon, the lot topped off with an 'egg beignet' - a deep-fried poached egg. Cholesterol hell, but heaven to eat.

Main courses should have been subtitled GSOH. Very fine cumin-scented rump of lamb came, in a flourish of Greek kitschness, with moussaka and salad. Despite our scepticism, and the lack of b»chamel in the moussaka, the arrangement worked well.

We also sniggered at my main course, a whole sea bass with a risotto of herbs and noisette butter sauce: the fish had been left intact - apart, magically, from the bones - sliced down the middle, splayed open and stuffed with the risotto. The result was like one of the centrefolds from that muchloved 1980s smutty book, Rude Food. Tasted fabulous, though.

Also excellent was a flawlessly roasted cod on a ragout of mussels and clams with another beignet, this time of salt cod brandade. The weirdness intensified when waiters flitted round us, dressing empty tables with those little pots of jam only encountered in hotel breakfasts; it was like, hidden in our etched glass nook, we'd ceased to exist. Were we the ghosts or were they? The 60-odd quid a head bill certainly felt corporeal enough.

Pearl
High Holborn, London, WC1V 7EN