Weir off to Brentford

Escapist food is a sort of comfort food, but it's not like toast or macaroni cheese. Escapist food can transport you: usually somewhere you have spent time and grown to love but far from humdrum home.

I escape to the Eastern Mediterranean - Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian - and one of my dad's transporting dishes is moules mariniere. When we were kids, we would pick mussels and then he would cook them in a pot the size of a bucket.

I chose moules when Kev The Chef and I went to Brentford's The Weir for lunch. Steamed Irish mussels with white wine, butter, onion and garlic is as close to mariniere as you can get away from the coast. The mussels were fresh-tasting enough, but being by the canal and not the sea meant the sauce had some flavour work to do here, and with a hefty slug of cream in the juice, it succeeded.

We wondered how long the mussels had been soaked, because the sauce was salty. Kev had a sort of sardine fillet ceviche to start, and while fresh sardines, fried, are the epitome of 'less is more', it was a pleasant change to taste them boneless and raw. The dish worked, though Kev thought the marinade could have done with more robust oil and a little bit of extra bite.

It's an All Bar One of a space, with newspapers on sticks, bare floorboards, white walls, and some smart leather dining chairs. Brentford's just Greater Chiswick really, and not half as far out as you'd think. From what I hear the area is on the up: in the last two years, several modernminded restaurants have opened and one of these is The Weir, a sort of gastropub that helps lift the provincial atmosphere for those forced to live in Legoland homes. It's snazzy, in that there are Belgian beers (but no cask ales) on tap.

Then our main courses arrived and what was going to be a positive review went up the swanny. When I chose pan-fried calves' liver with a balsamic vinegar gravy, Kev and I both knew this was going to be the test of the place. And, as our main courses were bought to the table, my nose knew that the test was a fail. I could smell vinegar before the plate hit the table. The dark vinegary juice seeped into every ingredient: the colcannon, the slightly rubbery bacon and the tough calves liver. Bum notes everywhere. Part of the failure of this dish was in the ingredients: the liver was cheap and the balsamic was not of the sweet, sticky, aged kind. Alain Ducasse said, '85% of cooking is shopping'. What you do in the kitchen is only half or, as Alain has it, 17/20ths of the story.

Kev had a confit of duck, soft and raggedy so that it wasn't quite meat anymore. A rosti was slimy: he liked the roasted garlic that accompanied it but it wasn't enough to save the plate because his red wine sauce was, in fact, more of that vinegar gravy. 'Was everything alright,' says the waitress? Well, 'No,' I say, 'it wasn't.' 'What is wrong with your food?' asked the manager. 'Well, the sauce tastes like vinegar and the liver is full of bloody tubes.' 'OK, I'll tell the chef,' the manager responds. 'At this point,' said Kev, 'the chef should come out.' He didn't, but he sent his apologies.

We were sorry too. The menu was long and perhaps more complicated than the kitchen could manage and most punters would rather have a good burger than crap calves liver, any day.