Stick to the buffet at Mantra

It's as if some novice town planner in the Middle Ages decided that it would be best to lump all the moody street names together in one corner - a nest of eccentricities which now forms the back door to Fenchurch Street Station.

You can wander up Seething Lane, take a detour into French Ordinary Court, or simply stick to Crutched Friars where Mantra is the latest incumbent at number 37.

This site was previously a restaurant called the Red Rose and, before that, one named the Viceroy. When it opened in 2004, Mantra split itself in two and the downstairs dining room offered the elegant Ayurvedic food of Southern India - the idea was that your waiter would look you up and down and then prescribe the dishes that would be most beneficial.

For hundreds of years Keralan food has been intertwined with good health and Ayurvedic principles and valued as much for its effect on your body as how it tastes.

But as you'll have guessed, this kind of good sense didn't catch the mood of the public in EC3 and, in 2005, it's out with the healthy grub and in with a big bar.

The downstairs room is poised to re-open as a refuge for the hard-drinking (visions of the Ayurvedic practitioners looking you over before suggesting plenty of lager followed by a terminal dose of Red Bull and vodka), while the upstairs is shoring up its curry house credentials.

The dining room is the sort of space that could only survive in the City Of London. Plush, faux-panelled, paint effects, plenty of space, plenty of carpet, modern but seeming ancient and with no windows whatsoever. Anyone for mixed messages? It's like being cast adrift in an Eighties banqueting suite.

Mantra's menu is also a touch schizoid. There are a few Southern specialities - cashew nut pakora delights as always, hot, crunchy, nearly brittle. Spicy lamb chilli fry is properly chilli hot, but doesn't have the genuine depth of flavour that characterises the best Southern cooking. There's also chemeen poriyal (prawns fried with coconut).

Main courses include a Kerala fish curry, which is presented as decent-sized chunks of white fish, well cooked but rather let down by an over acid tomato sauce. The choice of mains also extends to green mutton masala, chicken Malabar, and old favourites such as chicken tikka masala, rogan josh and chicken korma. A side dish of green bananas is well done with a rich flavour.

The problem with Mantra is that the balance between the cooking and the pricing seems to have slipped a bit - the Kerala fish curry comes in a pretty sound portion but with a price tag of £11.95. Even in EC3 this is fierce.