Well suited to dine at Zander

This review was first published in June 2000

Victoria is the land that gastronomy forgot. In a city that prides itself on offering some of the most interesting eating opportunities in the world, Victoria is an aberration. Were I asked to submit to one of those random-association tests and were someone to ask me to say the first thing that came into my head that linked food and Victoria, I might say Big Uns Ribs or Garfunkels. Perhaps such a negative attitude is unfair and its back streets may well be crowded with fine dining opportunities and Michelin stars I haven't yet discovered.

Presumably the people at Bank restaurant recognised that there was not so much a gap in the market here as a yawning bottomless chasm, so they opened Zander. A zander is a pike-perch, a freshwater fish. It is a clever name for a restaurant as it leaves you plenty of choice should you want to open a chain: Stickleback, Carp and Guppy are just some names that the powers that be might consider.

Zander is next to what used to be the St James's Court Hotel, now the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The hotel always struck me as a mighty odd place. Ten years ago I used to be deluged with invitations to 'food festivals' at the place. It makes you wonder: what sort of freak actually turned up at a themed buffet to celebrate the birthday of, say, King Baudouin of Belgium. I was told that at one of these festivals, the famous Mannekin Pis, a rather egregious piece of Brussels public sculpture depicting a urinating child, had been recreated out of butter ? apparently, as the evening wore on, the effigy melted and fell over. I am still not sure whether in telling me this, someone wasn't having a joke at my expense.

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight I rather miss the bizarre postmodernity of such events; they were truly ahead of their time. If someone announced such a happening now, it would be hailed as a major triumph of contemporary art, be opened by Chris Smith and probably receive Lottery funding.

Sadly, life is a matter of timing, in this case mistiming. Over the years St James's Court toyed with a Proven?al restaurant, a Chinese restaurant called the Inn of Happiness, and what someone described rather intriguingly as an 'Indian coffee shop'.

However, for once it seems that the now Crowne Plaza has got its timing right, and by allowing the Bank group into its premises, the hotel has actually got a restaurant worth visiting. At the front of the restaurant is a noisy, vaguely trendy bar which tries, and fails, to be Victoria's answer to the Met Bar, but manages to be a cut above the All Bar One-style of drinking establishment. One then walks along a corridor, flanked on one side by a glass-walled private dining-room. When I visited, this was full of shirt-sleeved executives enjoying a bibulous evening.

I was late for dinner with two women, one of whom, the one with the blackberry martini, is tipped as the next editor of the FT, while the other, a caipirinha drinker, is a high-powered political lobbyist. Using my most macho intonations, I called for a large Diet Coke and prepared to be severely out of my depth.

As you can imagine, the conversation was all a bit above my head. With these two, light inconsequential chitchat consists of such things as the change in the value of the Polish zloty, the knock-on effect for the Euro and whether the Rwandan guinea was about to devalue prompting a financial crisis among those who had gone 'long' on Ugandan ringgits. High, or even low, finance is not my strong point. When it comes to watches I feel on firmer ground, so I complimented the lobbyist on her Kutchinsky watch - it was a picture of go-anywhere elegance.

From then on the evening improved. The lobbyist admitted that her father had been Harold Macmillan's Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs, and I seem to remember watching a documentary showing footage of her dad saying that 'self-government is better than good government'. I daresay we have him to blame for such fiascos as Sierra Leone. Taking the early Sixties as my cue, I started to amuse myself ? and a party of heavy-drinking businessmen on a nearby table ? with my impressions of politicians of the never-had-it-so-good years. Happily, a waitress arrived to take our order before I had a chance to move on to the pound-in-your-pocket years of Harold Wilson.

From the number of dishes that were off, I thought we had stumbled into a Monty Python sketch. What is more, those that were 'on' bore only a passing resemblance to what we might be served. For instance, the dorade that the menu alleged was 'grilled and served with a marini?re of squid' was not served with squid.

As it was the next editor of the FT had carpaccio followed by zander and had no complaints about either. The lobbyist tossed her flame-haired locks and ordered black pudding and sweetbread salad, which she loved, and fried gorgonzola gnocchi with smoked tomato dressing, which looked more like potato croquettes and apparently tasted marginally less exciting than a bowl of Smash. I had a modest supper of asparagus, lobster Thermidor, and white chocolate cheesecake with blueberries.