Time to chill at the Hill

I wish the people at Crescent House would just relax. OK, so any new operation has a good excuse for being overwrought, but everything about this recent arrival in the 1970s apartment block quarter of Notting Hill was so clenched, we left feeling strung out rather than laid back and well fed.

Take our waitress. So eager was she to ensure we were having a good time - or using our knives properly? - that she positioned herself at a vantage point across from our table in an otherwise deserted restaurant and fixed us with a beady stare for most of our dinner.

Then there's the decor. There are some lovely touches - in the dining room, a giant moose head ('Think up a name for it!' urged our restaurant manager) and some beautifully gilded wallpaper used to intriguing effect on the ceiling.

Downstairs, the bar is made from roughly hewn wood, polished into prettiness. Illumination comes from vintage chandeliers (but you guessed that, didn't you?) and there's a rather fabulous garden, complete with outdoor bar.

It's a brave stab at trying to marry shabby chic insouciance to designer luxury but it only manages to look stiff and mannered. I expect once it gets battered about by the punters they're hoping to pull in - incongruously, a meticulously attired waiter stood outside like a Brick Lane tout trying to woo in what little passing trade there is - it should look a whole lot better.

Management was intrusive. Two young guys, groomed to requisite metrosexual standards and clearly alumni of the School Of Smarm - an everything-allrightlaydeez, glassy-stared approach that could curdle milk - buzzed around at every opportunity.

Downstairs, the bar menu read brilliantly: potted Morecambe Bay shrimps with toasted organic Hoxton bread; deep-fried whitebait with homemade saffron aioli; suckling pig sandwich. I wish we had eaten there. Because although chef Daniel Ostler is pretty hot (the owners think so too: he's mentioned so often on the menu that it reads like the early stages of a ferocious crush), his posher upstairs dining room menu has fallen victim to the same highly strung tendencies as the rest of the place.

So you get dishes such as 'roast baby artichoke hearts, overnight confit cherry tomatoes, endive, white truffle emulsion'. If it's a choice between that and a suckling pig sandwich, I know where I'm at.

Truffles were all over the shop: that emulsion, shaved summer truffles, white truffle mash. Of the ten starters and main courses on the ‡ la carte, truffles starred in four of them.

I ordered an apparently truffle-free starter - langoustines with parmesan gnocchi and squid ink purÈe; each crustacean arrived crowned with a slice of summer truffle. Did Ostler get a job lot?