Ramsay's jungle jaunt

Our guest critic knows a thing or two about food - it's none other than Gordon Ramsay! An experienced chef he may be but when it comes to keeping the kids happy he's in the same boat as everyone else. He takes his tribe along to the Rainforest Café and Restaurant 1837.

With four under fives, meals at the Ramsay household can resemble feeding time at the zoo. So The Rainforest Café seemed an appropriate choice for a family meal out to celebrate Meg's first day at school. She had been unimpressed with the school "restaurant", where her mashed potatoes were "underseasoned".

At five, it's good to see her palate developing, so it was with high hopes that my wife Tana and I took Megan, along with three-year-old twins Jack and Holly, and one-year-old Matilda, to The Rainforest Café, which aims to recreate a corner of the Amazon on Shaftesbury Avenue.

It is part of a large, international restaurant chain pitched squarely at families, and you arrive through a shop full of cuddly toys and other "please, mum" merchandise, all displayed within a child's reach. Descending the stairs, you enter a dark green world that feels as if you are wrapped in an ivy duvet.

But this Shaftesbury Avenue rainforest is plastic-fantastic, and looking tatty. The thick canopy of plastic leaves, flapping butterflies and stiff animatronic monkeys, leopards and other critters, whose movements reminded me of amateurish break dancing, disguise grubby air conditioning units.

The kids, however, were in heaven - having torn through the restaurant, they quickly settled into their colouring-in. The Rainforest Rascal's menu, which doubles up as a canvas, can only be described as a jumble sale of junk food - a depressing collection of deep-frozen or deep-fried foods, all served with obligatory bowls of ketchup.

Jack's chicken goujons were a nasty contrast of luminous orange breadcrumbs, freezer-dehydrated chicken and an oil slick that would rival the Exxon Valdez. Holly's Chicken Cucoon was a vile, spongy, chicken hot dog encased in sweet, synthetic bread, accompanied by limp chips.

The twins' fusilli pasta was coated in tomato sauce that they thought tasted like Dolmio. Everything was washed down with a Cherry Ice Blast, a jazzedup Slush Puppie which tasted of cherry lip gloss and no doubt packed a Tyson-sized punch of E-numbers. Tana and I fared little better. My pork dumplings sprinkled with carrot were predictably deep-fried; a flabby pocket of batter, containing dismal grey filling.

Tana thought her vegetable samosas with potato salad, sweet chilli sauce and houmus were "tasty". For mains, I ordered both a vegetarian and carnivorous option. My Ozzie Spring Rolls confirmed my worst suspicions about vegetarian food.

Yet more deep-fried pastry, whose under-layers were greasily raw. A sledgehammer of chilli sauce couldn't disguise the fact that the filling was 90 per cent cabbage. At £11.95, this is not just poor, it's daylight robbery.