Address: High Street, Cookham, Maidenhead, Berkshire
Telephone: 01628 520085
Rating: 14/20

I asked Heston Blumenthal where he went to eat in his neck of the woods when he was off-duty. Malik's in Cookham, he said, after a bit of hesitation - the kids love going there, and when Jack had his India project at school they let him make his own naan in the tandoor oven (anyone whose children have also suffered trial by India project will realise what a boon this was). Well, that was good enough for me, so I booked a table for three, made up of my brother Tom, aka The Professor or The Fulminator for reasons that I won't go into here, and my sister-in-law Helen, whose face would be an excuse to launch a thousand ships and burn the topless towers of Ilium on a regular basis.

It was just as well that I did have at least two alter eaters, because the night of our dinner at Malik's I was swatted by a touch of flu and, while my tastebuds were in perfect working order, my appetite was rather less than its finely tuned self. I tell you this not for the sake of sympathy, but simply to let you know just how dedicated I am to the job.

Cookham is one of that string of small, dormitory villages, like Bray, Marlow, Sonning, Wargrave and Henley, sprinkled along the banks of the Thames between Maidenhead and Reading. Some are dormitories for London, others for the next world. They all have the neat and tidy virtues that financial respectability and social desirability bring. The phrase "rough edge" has little resonance in such places.

Malik's is to be found in a pretty-as-a-picture, crinkly-crankly, beam-and-white-plaster building that might once have been a pub. And on Saturday night it was teeming - the serving crew was turning tables like merry-go-rounds and turning people away, as well. The menu was a mixture of the familiar - murgh biriany, lamb tikka, king prawn achari, lamb pasanda - and the less familiar (to me, at any rate) - marrechi paneer, anaans haash, chringri saag paneer, tetul lamb - to name a few of the 100 or more dishes on offer. As far as I could tell, these dishes did not speak distinctly of any one particular region, although its general tone suggested a Bengali presence in the kitchen.

My appetite was limited by my condition, but Helen and Tom were not constrained by any such considerations and soon set about lining up a first course of Malik's specials - pancake kebab, aloo chat, king prawn suka, marrechi paneer and tikka nazakat - to which I added a modest murgh liver. We followed these with sikandari lamb, lamb buna, haash jhalpiazi, bindi, mushroom bhajee and basmati rice, which was actually quite modest by the usual chronic over-ordering standards of my family.

To be honest, the food was something of a curate's egg. My murgh - chicken - livers were excellent, juicily cooked and lightly and cleanly spiced. Some of Malik's special selection were also tip-top tastes, particularly the chicken nazakat and the marrechi paneer, a pepper stuffed with cheese, covered in breadcrumbs, fried and served with chilli jelly on top. The aloo chat, on the other hand, was plain dull, while the lamb inside the pancake was stringy and the king prawn suka looked distinctly dodgy.

This one step forward, two steps back routine continued through the rest of the dinner. The haash jhalpiazi was ham-fisted. This cooking style was developed for the Anglo-Indian market as a way of using up leftovers, lamb in particular, using serious spicing, with green chillies given the lead role. I can see that duck should respond well to the jhalpiazi treatment, but in this case the subtleties of the spicing were drowned in a sea of rocket-propelled, all-purpose glop.

Brother Tom, however, hummed happily about his sikandari lamb as he peeled dollops of meat off a massive shank. In this case, the liveliness of the spicing stood up well in a tomato-based sauce. On the other hand, Helen picked at her lamb buna as if toying with an unexploded bomb. It wasn't that bad, she said, but wondered where the flavour had gone. The more delicate flavours of ginger and coriander did not get much of a look-in past the searing chilli. But then, the rice and the vegetable accompaniments were excellent.

It may have been that I was beginning to lose concentration at this point. Certainly the service was - although, to be fair, they were pretty hard-pressed. Still, when I'm paying £98.90 for three people, of which, apparently, £26.60 was for drink (I say apparently because I received an itemised bill only when I asked for it; and so illegible is it that I am at a loss to make out what some of the items are), I am inclined to raise the bar a bit in my expectations. And, generally speaking, I am not sure that Malik's quite cleared it. It's certainly a cut above the general run of regional Indian restaurants, but not quite as big a cut as it seems to think it is.

· Open All week, lunch, 12 noon-2.30pm, dinner, 6-11pm. Menus Super Banquet (for four or more people), £18.95; Special Banquet (for two or more), £18.95. All major credit cards.