Telephone: 020-7495 5999
Address: 26 Albermarle Street, London W1
Rating: 12/20

I will concede that sesame seeds have their place in the world. They have a long and distinguished history in the kitchen. Herodotus, Strabo and Theophrastus all give sesame an honourable mention, and Dioscorides in the first century AD tells how they were sprinkled on bread in Sicily. The Chinese would be lost without the seeds and the Indians without the oil, and you can't really make a decent hummus without a dollop of tahini to help things along. They are high in polyunsaturated oleic and linoleic fatty acids. They are jumping with vitamin E.

But I find that the flavour of sesame, roasted or unroasted, becomes pretty trying pretty quickly - and when it turns up in some form or other in virtually every dish put in front of you, you wonder whether the chef is mad or has simply over-ordered them and is trying to get rid of the bloody things. After a lunch at Sumosan in the company of Philbrick, I still can't make up my mind, but I am inclined to plump for the mad option - although it's true that the sesame seed does reach its culinary zenith in the hands of the Japanese, and Sumosan is a Japanese restaurant, of a kind.

Of exactly which kind I am not quite sure, either. It isn't pure traditional Japanese, all stark surfaces, sushi, sashimi, tempura, teriyaki, and bento. Nor is it the modish minimalism, slim-hipped service and high invention of Nobu, Tsunami and Zuma. It is somewhere - suavely, globally, unidentifiably, purgatorially - in between, comfortably upholstered in various shades of mushroom, with waitresses touchingly, almost intrusively, anxious to play their part. And the food? Well, there's the usual blithe and baffling range, sushi and sashimi, with not much to mark it out from international expectations; tempura and teppanyaki; soups and noodles. And there are also the new-wave, new-fangled bits: appetisers, salads, black cod with miso (haven't I had that somewhere before?), foie gras with wild berries, Barbary duck with lingonberry sauce and so on.

Thoroughly unmanned by all this, Philbrick and I took the cowards' way out via the itadakimase, or tasting menu, which is where the sesame seeds came in. They came in with the kaiso, a seaweed salad with a goma (ie, sesame) dressing; and the tuna furikaki, a dry, lacklustre piece of fish seared on the outside, raw inside, with a pasty, uninspiring, leatheroid rendering - I wouldn't call it a crust - of sesame and almond; and the lamb treated the same way, with, I wouldn't be at all surprised, sesame in the dipping sauce; and the tiger prawns and scallops with various crusts... and so on, sesame crunching between our teeth, coating tongues and tonsils.

The dobinmushi, a clear soup with little bits of shrimp and seaweed, provided a bit or respite, but not inspiration exactly. Neither did the sushi, which was bog-standard and cut so thick that it was impossible to fit a slice into even my not inconsiderable mouth. We had to saw up the flobby slices with chopsticks, not the easiest thing in the world. Ditto the sashimi. And then there was the pudding, a remarkable, postmodern interpretation of summer pudding in the form of a pyramid, with crisp bread that had, apparently, been soaked in sake, various berries inside, and a custard of awe-inspiring sweetness.

The one ray of sunshine in this depressing sequence was the rhubarb sake, which was pale pink and dangerously gentle to drink, although, at £8 per small flask, it would prove prohibitively expensive to get stuck into it in a major way. Then again, Sumosan might prove expensive in any regard. We shared the tasting menu at £40, which was just about enough for two in terms of quantity. With the sake and water, the bill was £62, which isn't too bad for a metropolitan glory hole these days. But eating à la carte would send that figure hurtling upwards at dizzying speed.

It is difficult to be enthusiastic about Sumosan. The site that it occupies on Albermarle Street is haunted by the ghosts of two Oliver Peyton enterprises, Coast and Mash Mayfair, which, like chimney sweepers, came to dust. I wonder how long this new incarnation will last. Somehow, the elegant, mushroom shades put me more in mind of a funeral pall rather than a sparkling future.

· Open Lunch, Mon-Fri, 12 noon -3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-12 midnight. Menus: Set menus at the sushi bar, from £20 upwards. Cards All major cards (not Diner's). Wheelchair access.