This diamond fails to sparkle

What an odd spot Diamonds And Pearls is. Odd decor: prints of old-school stars including Humphrey Bogart; clotted-blood coloured walls; beautiful, twinkling chandeliers ('They're hired,' confided the charming and very pretty manageress).

Odd menu: dishes with no cohesive link or relation to each other. Odd behaviour on the part of our staff: our barman insisted on personally sampling his handiwork by dipping a straw into our cocktails and then emptying the contents into his mouth. It took 20 minutes to get mine as a junior staff member had to be sent to Safeway to pick up the ginger beer for a Moscow Mule; a fairly obvious requirement, I'd have thought, especially in such a short cocktail list.

And odd clientele: apart from the stout party sitting on his own with his large laundry bag, everyone there seemed to know each other from some kind of dodgy past life.

The food, however, wasn't odd, just pretty awful: limp frozen shrimp on packet salad with no discernible chilli masqueraded as piri-piri prawns; flat mushrooms came with grill-blasted Port Salut cheese on top and more of the salad; strange, gritty Toulouse sausages lolled on lumpy mash containing none of the promised grain mustard.

A lamb steak with mint Hollandaise was just dire: poor quality, overcooked meat in a kind of savoury custard. Before I'd arrived, my date had heard the owner loudly berating the chef; much as I dislike bullying in restaurants, in this case I reckon he deserved it.

Diamonds and Pearls
404 North End Road, SW6