Triumph of style over substance

It is a useful rule of thumb that restaurants offering entertainment tend not to offer dazzling food.

The wonderful Paul Chan's Gracelands Palace way down the Old Kent Road is a prototypical example, but here the Chinese Elvis more than compensates for a lack of refinement in the kitchen.

Another is Opium, a Soho nightclub, where I ate a lobster that made my stomach feel like a lava lamp. In Opium's defence, I have to say that the owner said George Clooney liked the lobster, even if I didn't. If you have a choice of telling your friends that either George Clooney or Nick Foulkes likes your shellfish, I too would choose the former.

Given that the star of Ocean's Eleven liked Opium, I feel he might also entertain a fondness for a newish place in what is rather ambitiously billed as 'the vibrant heart of Fulham'.

Called Sugar Hut, this is a restaurant/lounge/bar/fortified bunker off Fulham Broadway, where, of an evening, the air is thick with the cries of inebriated young people and the heady aroma of deep-fried food.

Sugar Hut has plundered London's inventory of late-20th/early-21st-century restaurant trends. The name has one thinking of the famous Sugar Club or, perhaps, the Roti Hut; the look is Momo-style Moroccan; the chill-out-zone bar recalls Chinawhite and, like Hakkasan, it has a Claude Challe mix on the sound system. Much in the way that Las Vegas brings the world to America for Americans who would rather not travel the world, so Sugar Hut brings the West End to North End Road.

Sugar Hut is, allegedly, a Thai restaurant. If this is the case, I would love to see what David 'shallot sprinkler' Thompson of Nahm - the world's only Michelin-starred Thai restaurant - would make of the place. The food hovers neasily around the level of pre-prepared supermarket TV dinners; though, given that supermarket food is on a mission of constant improvement, I feel this judgment might be a little harsh on some supermarket dishes.

I took as my date a leading It Man who is seldom out of the papers for his high-society antics. His verdict set the tone for the evening when he described the Gradook Moo Thod (fried spare ribs with garlic and pepper) as being sub-Texas Lone Star standard and, as he lives near Gloucester Road, he should know. My selection of 'golden fried seafood' Thalay Thod would have been a disgrace to the good name of my favourite mariner, Captain Birds Eye, but I can speak fondly of the Thai chilli sauce (a sort of tangy marmalade).

Things looked up slightly with the main courses. My stir-fried king prawns with curry sauce, coconut cream and kaffir lime leaves was not unpleasant and the steamed jasmine rice plopped out of its beaker and onto my plate where it maintained its shape like an albino Christmas pudding. Less successful was an accompanying vegetable dish, involving decoratively carved carrot and soft bean curd. Nor was my friend particularly enthusiastic about his stir-fried beef.

For some reason, we decided to eat pudding: ripe banana cooked in coconut milk was all right in that there was limited scope to mess it up, while pink chestnut cubes in coconut milk (again) and syrup (yes, just syrup) was surprisingly palatable, a sort of chilled soup that might have been rather good, had it not been for the mound of crushed ice that sat on top of it, when a few shavings might have done.