Telephone: 020-7434 9899
Address: 139 Wardour Street, London W1
Rating: 7/20

When radishes in yoghurt are the best thing you eat, it tells you something about the restaurant in question. Ophim is the restaurant in question. It bills itself as serving Authentic Modern Indian Cuisine. This, as someone once said of the phrase "military intelligence", contains an interior fallacy. If it is authentic, how can it be modern? Or if it is modern, how can it be authentic? Is it authentically modern? Or authentically Indian? If it is authentically Indian, can it be modern as well? You may think I am splitting hairs, but, tell me, please, what to make of grilled kiwi fruit stuffed with coconut and crab meat?

Although I have always preferred its original name of Chinese gooseberry, I have no wish to deprive the kiwi fruit of a place in the gourmet firmament, just so long as that place is a suitably small one. I have always seen it as the lace doily of the plate, with a coy decorative attraction, but very little to recommend it by way of taste.

So why did I choose a dish in which it had been given a leading role, you ask. To be truthful, I was curious to see if another cooking culture could rescue the kiwi fruit from well-deserved obscurity. The answer is no. Grilling kiwi fruits deprives them of the immunity of tastelessness in favour of something really rather nasty. Stuffing them with crab meat and coconut doesn't improve matters, either.

And then came rogan josh. As far as my researches are concerned, authentic rogan josh is a stew, the finest examples of which come from Kashmir, according to Madhur Jaffrey. It is red, says Ms Jaffrey, because of the generous amount of chilli in the stew. The kitchen at Ophim got that right, but almost everything else wrong. There was a rather good onion-based goo, red and peppy with chilli, but of stew there was not a trace. Instead, there was a "grilled salt marsh lamb steak". I have no idea whether it was salt marsh lamb or not. It had certainly been nicely grilled and, as a matter of fact, it went rather well with the onion and chilli goo, but rogan josh it was not.

Chlorinda did better. Just. She had jeera murg, which purported to be chicken with cumin and dry coriander, wrapped in crisp fried baby aubergine. The aubergine and the chicken were there, and the cumin and "dry" coriander may have been, but all were formed into a distinctly French looking timbale, in which the aubergine had the texture of a sun-blessed Miami octogenarian and the chicken had been cooked to a seer, dessicated woodiness. Malchchi palak, fillet of sea bass with chilli and garlic spiced chicken and kadi sauce (what's that when it's at home?), was, how shall we say, undistinguished. Any attempted and distinctive spicing was buried beneath a wash of chilli.

We did puddings, too; papti sapta, which was not the coconut roll with jaggery sauce that the menu claimed, and looked suspiciously like an envelope; and khajur khubani samosa, or apricot and date samosa with vanilla ice cream, which was akin to eating felt with dried fruit.

I have nothing against chefs who wish to ginger up their cooking traditions. However, I do ask that the new wave dishes should at least taste as good as the old wave. The trouble with Ophim is that they don't. Not only don't their offerings taste as good as the old ones, they charge you £23 per head for three courses for the privilege (or £17.50 for two courses).

So the bill came to £65, although we only had two glasses of wine (to be truthful, I had both of them, and one coffee). This is ludicrous. It suggests pretensions way above its station. I know that the investors have to cover what was, no doubt, a pretty expensive design bill for the silly, sombre, stark dining room and the staff uniforms, but that's almost as much as you would pay at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's.

Or, perhaps to use a more accurate yardstick, rather more than at either Zaika or the Cinnamon Club, where the new wave, or modern Indian cooking, is in the hands of talented chefs.

· Open Mon-Sat, 12 noon-11pm. Menus: lunch, £17.50 for two courses, £23 for three courses; dinner, £38 for five courses. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access (no WC).