Palatial is hardly the word

ONE PALACE GATE; 1 Palace Gate, London W8 5LS. Tel: 0171 589 9992. Open daily, lunch 12- 3; dinner 7-10.30. Table d'hote, two courses pounds 16, three courses pounds 19.50 ; average three courses a la carte pounds 35. All credits cards except Diners

WHEN a new restaurant opens, you don't like to put the dampeners on months of effort, creativity, imagination and hope with sneering negativity. As a fresh new breath joins the wind of design and culinary excellence whooshing through the modern British restaurant scene, to knock rather than celebrate seems joyless and mean.

On the other hand: when you think of all the restaurants in basements and former mini-cab offices in miles-from-the-centre spots that struggle to succeed, without backing or connections, through originality, style, skill and fair pricing; then you visit a new restaurant overlooking Kensington Gardens, within spitting distance of Kensington High Street and the Albert Hall, with a chef who used to cook at the Ivy and the Caprice, and a manager who helped relaunch the Escargot; and you find yourself leaving in dismay before coffee and dessert having paid nearly pounds 80 for two for a couple of uninspiring courses and an indifferent bottle of Macon Villages - to mince words would seem careless and wrong.

We began the evening optimisitcally. With its floor to ceiling glass windows just across the busy road from Princess Diana's house, One Palace Gate looks smart and inviting. The menu, too, was full of dishes which - unusually these days - sounded mouthwatering rather than trendily bizarre: creamed linguini with langoustines, goat's cheese with endive, wild mushroom risotto, roast fillet of salmon with sorrel and herb sauce, roast stuffed breast of guinea fowl with shallots and green cabbage.

Once inside the street level "lounge bar", though, we were bamboozled by decor and ambience so distinctly saying "middle-range chain hotel" that we wouldn't have been surprised if they had started setting up the breakfast buffet ready for the morning. The piped strains of "The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music" oozed through the air, there were gilt banisters left, right and centre, framed vegetable prints and a theme best summed up by the word "grey": grey fake marble walls, grey fitted carpets, grey versions of those hotel upright/armchair hybrids with a curve of round wood at the back, and grey furnishing fabrics featuring the sort of tiny repeated designs more usually found on ties or socks.

Although a reasonably priced set menu is offered (pounds 16 for two courses, pounds 19.50 for three) we couldn't help but notice the a la carte prices had sneaked an extra pound or five on top of the standard posh restaurant figure. How do you arrive at pounds 11.75 for a plain Scottish smoked salmon starter, pounds 18.50 for a peppered fillet steak, or pounds 19.50 for venison with cranberries - unless the salmon was an Olympic swimmer, the cranberries individually signed by Delia and the reindeer hand-reared by Bjork? Superb haute cuisine, we hoped, was the only plausible explanation.

In the basement dining room the piped music was replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and the decorative theme had been pushed to the outer limits of greyness, broken by a weird black criss-cross trellised ceiling dotted with spotlights. It would be the ideal venue for a Princess Diana secret tryst, with its lack of windows and the fact that out of the multi- million population of central London, only six people (including us and a foursome we thought might have been a group in the style of Bucks Fizz) had chosen to spend their Saturday night at One Palace Gate.

The wine list, in keeping with the hotel style, was high on mark-up and short on the lower range. House wine was pounds 15 and there were only four other French wines under pounds 20; our pounds l8 Macon Villages wasn't a patch on what you pick up find for pounds 4.69 in Thresher's. The bread rolls boded well: as fashionably rough-hewn and delicious as anyone could wish for and offered with enthusiastic frequency.

At the first sight of my mushroom risotto, however, my heart sank. Call me pretentious and calorie obsessed, but what you want for a risotto starter, surely, is a couple of exquisite spoonfuls tastefully arranged in the centre of the plate. Instead, my dish looked like a plate of tinned rice pudding sprinkled with mushrooms instead of nutmeg, or a full bowl of breakfast porridge lightly coloured with Marmite. It was nice - but there were none of the delicate flavoursome hints you might expect for pounds 7.75: fine stock, liquor, herbs, garlic, lemon, olive oil or whatever were submerged in an overwhelming taste of, well, mushroom juice. My date's truffled charlotte potatoes and artichokes looked great, but similarly he thought subtlety had been lost in the name of garlic.

"It reminds me of the food you get at very posh weddings," my date said, toying with his sea bream. I knew what he meant. There were all the right fashionable combinations. But just as posh wedding food presents itself as posh restaurant food but tastes like mass cuisine, this was cuisine setting itself up as more haute than it really was - certainly in terms of the pricing. Everything was extremely hot, but the parsnip under my duck confit had the slightly sealed surface that suggests "oven" or "grill" rather than the steamy, fluffy heat that suggests being whisked over a hotplate specially seconds before. The duck itself was almost like a Chinese crispy duck on the outside; on the inside it was a bit too pale and dry, bringing the words "duck McNugget" unbidden to mind.

Was it an off-night, we wondered? Were 50 people about to burst in enthusiastically from the Albert Hall and make us feel stupid? Were we being harsh on the food because the ambience was so little to our taste? Palace Gate is an area bursting with foreign embassies. It could be that the hotel style and expense-account prices are there to make the consuls and ambassadors feel relaxed and at home. But noticing a green exit sign with an arrow pointing downwards and a little man running hell for leather towards the stairs, we both agreed we knew exactly what he felt like.