Deca, Mayfair

If you're a vegetarian, you may find Deca a little unreconstructed. If you're a Greek scholar, you may, like Richard Johnson, find the latest Nico Ladenis restaurant doesn't quite add up

I've heard that lipstick contains cod sperm. But if it's true, how do they go about collecting it? The usual way, I guess – candlelit dinner, soft music ... I'm not a lipstick user myself, but it was complications like these that forced me to give up on vegetarianism. My sister Eve, however, kept the faith – which wasn't easy in a place like Deca. It didn't offer a single vegetarian main course. "You can have a salad," said the waitress. Salad? And the Be More Specific Award goes to ...

Deca is in a thoroughly "civilised" part of town. I know that civility is a difficult thing to define, but in the olden days, a naked maiden could ride through a "civilised" kingdom, carrying a purse filled with gold, and remain unmolested. She still could along Conduit Street today. As long as she avoided the Piccadilly one-way system, that is. So Deca is a thoroughly "civilised" restaurant, designed with a real indifference to fashion – rather like the menu. They obviously think vegetarianism is just a fad.

I should point out that this dinner – with my two sisters – was important. Michaela was going to live in Italy. Now, other things may change us, but we start and end with family, so I wanted it to be special. Which is why I chose the new restaurant from Nico Ladenis. "You can have a salad" just wasn't good enough. A fuss would only have made matters worse. So, as Sherlock used to say, I was faced with a three-pipe problem. Unfortunately, pipe-smokers are also as welcome as vegetarians at Deca.

To compensate, I found myself praising the virtues of salad. Recently I have been reading about a 17th-century scholar who believed that salads could help mankind regain the wisdom and purity of paradise lost. He reckoned that Eden just needed to be pursued on a smaller, more plate-based scale. In other words, to experience real heaven on earth, just toss yourself a few leaves, which is what my sister had to do. I gave in to the dark side, however, and ordered the potted shrimps.

The surroundings were elegant, the napery, the glass, the silverware all immaculate. We sat by nine-foot windows, which lent a real airiness to service upstairs. But downstairs was a little bit cosier. In fact, some of the banquettes looked a little too cosy. Deca is quite honestly every bit as civilised as Chez Nico. And so it should be - the Chez Nico team moved across wholesale when the lease on Ladenis's Park Lane institution ran out.

Nico has now retired, and does his cooking in the south of France. They say he's still "experimenting", but his menus don't change. They evolve. So, at Deca, there's an asparagus risotto – quite simply the best risotto my sister has ever tasted – which replaces his classic truffle risotto. But the tortellini of langoustines in lobster sauce is still there from his Chez Nico days. The Deca team like to think of it as a three-star menu for less money.

The only dish to disappoint was the monkfish Roger Vergé at £15.50. Most fin fish tend to cook quickly. So quickly, in fact, that they can be difficult to grill. But the texture of monkfish is more akin to that of a crustacean (it was once known as poor man's lobster), and never falls apart before it's brown. But, if it's not thoroughly cooked, it can be tough, which is what happened at Deca. Either that, or it was left around to wait for my entrecôte Béarnaise. These things happen in new kitchens.

Fabrice – that's pronounced "Fabreze" – made up for it, though. Fabrice is a restaurant manager who fragrances the room magnificently. What a man – revolutions are halted, tigers tamed, pi calculated. To be honest, though, he was the only member of Deca's staff who did appear happy in his (or her) own skin. The smiles don't look real yet, and fists are clenched just a little too tightly behind backs. But pretty soon the starch will start to wash out of the matching shirts and ties.

"Pudding or no pudding?" asked Fabreze. "I sound like Shakespeare but, actually, I studied Molière ..." I felt like telling Fabreze to pull up a chair. I certainly wasn't going to pay £10.50 for his cheese tray, so we settled on a soft iced almond and hazelnut praline with raspberry coulis at £6.50. I made the mistake of asking Fabreze the difference between a praline and an ice cream, and he went to ask the chef for the recipe. It's a brave man who takes this course of action on a Saturday night one week after opening.

During the 1968 student riots in France, crowds chanted for the end of Latin. In Britain, the fatal blows were dealt with a little less drama. But now that classics dons at Oxford are teaching their discipline ab initio – from scratch – I thought it fair to conclude that Latin really was dead. But then Fabreze told me that Deca was Latin, and that it was a clever name because it's the tenth restaurant in the Nico chain. I didn't like to say so, but it's actually Greek. Still, it could be far worse – they called the last restaurant Incognico.

Deca, 23 Conduit Street, London W1 (020-7493 7070).

To contact Richard Johnson, visit www.rjsj.demon.co.uk.