Mandarin Oriental, London

One look at the new, grand Mandarin Oriental and you'll think you're in Hong Kong. But only until the food arrives, laments Terry Durack

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Please, don't insult me. Here I am, looking forward to an elegant and refined meal at one of the most high-born and high-priced Chinese restaurants in town, and the first thing that hits the table is a comp starter of chicken satay in peanut sauce.

What a let-down. Where is the delicate dumpling, the shaving of Yunnan ham, the chic little cup of fragrant double-boiled broth? Instead, just a plebby chicken-on-a-stick pinched from Malaysia. I'm affronted because somebody obviously thinks the clientele would prefer it to something authentically Chinese. I'm also cross because it's boring, dry and dull, with none of the benchmark sizzle and scorch.

What did I expect? I expected that, with the Dorchester's revamping of The Oriental, London would at last have a high-living, fine-dining Chinese restaurant that could mix it with the famed banquet palaces of Hong Kong's grandest hotels. The meals I've had at the Hotel Peninsula's atmospheric Spring Moon, the venerable Man Wah at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and the Island Shangri La's glossy Shang Palace rank among my best ever; their chefs cleverly able to improve through refinement rather than detract.

Not only has the Dorchester upgraded the look and feel of The Oriental, but "master of wine" Peter McCombie has created a special wine list, and executive chef Kenneth Poon has introduced a range of new Hong Kong-inspired dishes including deep-fried eel with cinnamon blossom sauce, and sautéed prawns with glutinous rice.

It certainly feels and looks like its Hong Kong equivalents, with its priceless treasures, rich fabrics, large clothed tables and serried ranks of female greeters and male waiters. The grandeur is marred by low ceilings, so it's more like being in a basement, but that's very HK. The newly decorated private rooms – Chinese, Indian, Thai – glimpsed on the way to the table are the most beautiful in the entire hotel, camply gorgeous in purples, reds and golds.

In spite of the new dishes, the menu is disappointingly Westernised, with no mention of whole steamed fish or abalone, and plenty of lowest-common-denominator dishes such as lemon chicken, pork ribs, sweet and sour pork, and crab claws. If that's your bag, then you might enjoy the place, because they would probably do them well enough.

The prices, however, are truly alarming. At £46, the Peking duck in two courses costs roughly £10 more than it does at the Peninsula's very upmarket Spring Moon. Nevertheless, it seems every table but my own is tucking into duck pancakes. Three teenage boys at one table even wash it down with tall glasses of Coke. Sure beats pizza on room service.

My starters are united by virtue of the fact that neither is terribly good. Five small boiled dumplings of prawn and chicken (£11) squat glumly in a bowl of drab sweet soy, their fillings too solid and meaty to reach any level of delicacy. One of the contradictions of Cantonese cooking is that the lightness of great dim sum generally comes from a generous use of pork fat, which renders throughout the steaming. These are probably low-kilojoule versions, but are heavy and dull.

A dish billed as roast spicy duck with jellyfish (£12.50) is a travesty to anyone expecting a refreshing toss of crunchy, linguine-like jellyfish and rich, juicy duck. Oh no, that's too simple for this kitchen. Instead, it cooks a duck breast separately, slices it French-style and dresses it strangely with what tastes like Thai fish sauce, lime juice and honey. The dried jellyfish has been properly rehydrated and sesame-oiled but is corralled away from the duck by a ring of cucumber. The whole thing is joyless.

At least the three main courses are an improvement. Brisket of beef (£18.50) is reasonable, being slow-braised with carrot and long white radish, but the beef is firm and solid, and the gravy needs the oomph of more ginger and star anise to raise it from Irish stewiness.

Deep-fried eel (£18) is luscious and fragrant – four squirrel-cut curls of fatty flesh, touched with the seemingly inevitable sweet sauce. The highlight is a generous bowl of snow pea shoots (£10). They are sauced in the traditional manner with a white gloss of crabby, eggy gloop that looks – I won't tell you what it looks like, you'd never eat it – but tastes light and sophisticated and all those things I miss about fine Cantonese cooking this evening.

It has been an inauthentic, ersatz meal attended by charmless staff on automatic pilot, and we've paid through our long gwei-lo (foreign devil) noses for the privilege. The food has mostly been boring and bland with little of the graceful subtlety of fine Cantonese food, although the eel and pea shoots show the kitchen is capable of higher things.

Compare The Oriental to its HK peers, or to equivalently priced London restaurants (Le Gavroche, Gordon Ramsay, Petrus, La Tante Claire, etc) and it appears not to be trying.

To be fair, the audience for this food is a narrow one – a protected species of equally rich and conservative American, English and Middle Eastern people, for whom The Oriental is a safe, protected quarantine from reality. Anyone who gets insulted by chicken satay, and appalled by paying £8.40 for a pot of green tea for two, has only himself to blame.