Young contender

This restaurant must be for young people, because it was full of them on the night we visited (there's a hint in the name). At the risk of sounding like the worst kind of pompous fart, eateries with la jeunesse as the target audience too often come across as tarted-up junk-fooderamas. Thankfully, Club Bar & Dining is considerably better than that.

OK, so there's the Shaun Clarkson (La Pigalle, Cheyne Walk Brasserie) makeover of what was the short-lived Grocer On Warwick. Upstairs, there's a New York-style, bare brick, booths, candelabra and angled mirrors, not-trying-too-hard vibe. Downstairs in the low-lit cocktail bar, things are more louche: fuchsia flowers rampage over walls and spirit bottles glitter in the half light. These bordering-on-the-hackneyed details signal that the middle-aged need not apply. So far, so predictable.

The menu, too, is resolutely solid - but suggests that they've been studying the starry trajectory of the Nick Jones joints: Electric Brasserie, High Road House et al. It has enough choices with a whiff of sophistication to wow first daters (iced shellfish platters; seared fillet steak with bone marrow sauce) coupled with the sort of utterly safe options that are a sop to the pickiest youthful eater (cheese, onion, avocado and chilli toasted sandwich, whole roast chicken). With three days' notice, you can even order whole roast piglets or lambs for six to ten people, at £200 a crispy pop.

What is surprising is the quality. The raw ingredients are chosen with care - free-range meat, duck from Telmara Farm in Essex, wild seafood, those lambs and piglets are Iberian - and cooked sympathetically.

I'll get the only duffers out of the way first: a crispy duck salad with piquillo peppers and white beans featured duck of such fibrous, spiky impenetrability that I felt like calling on a dental hygienist afterwards to help me wave it goodbye. It was swamped in gloopy, too-sweet sauce and the white beans had the mealiness of the overcooked (or tinned).

Then a lobster club sandwich, where the toast had become flannelly and soggy and I found myself playing hunt the lobster.

Apart from those disappointments, our meal was great. I can't boil an egg to save my life (oh, I can cook like an angel, I just can't boil an egg, no matter what the estimable Delia tells me) so I was thrilled with my perfectly wibbly boiled eggs - two of 'em! - with brioche soldiers and celery salt, a blast from childhood.

Dressed crab was packed with fresh and sweet white crab meat, supported by the funkiness of the brown. Much more adult was a T-bone steak - a distinguished ambassador for properly raised meat - crowned with anchovy butter. And verging on the X-rated was a side dish of creamed spinach laced with foie gras, an entirely new combination on me and a sinfully successful one. Home fries were chunks of potatoes, pan-roasted into tenderness and spiked with chilli and crisped shallots.

But the cheesecake that followed was a five-star king of desserts. A fudgy, trembly, creamy hunk of gorgeousness on a crumbly biscuit base. And, talking of gorgeousness, did I mention the staff?

Club Bar & Dining is the offspring of Brenhan Magee (of Jerusalem, and Salvador & Amanda) and Simon Jordan (chairman of Crystal Palace football club). Between them they've come up with something perfectly pitched at slinky young Londoners with a few bob in their Mulberrys.

The Club Bar & Dining
Warwick Street, London, W1B 5NE