Vernon's
2 Wilmslow Road, Manchester (0870 220 0560)
Meal for two, including wine: too much at any price

I knew from the moment I attempted to cut the sweet fried dumpling in half that we were in serious trouble. I pushed down hard. Nothing.

I pushed down again and suddenly, bang, half a lump of deep-fried sweet sponge sprang off my plate, bounced on to the floor and disappeared under a table. Perhaps this dumpling was trying to do me a favour, to spare me the horror of eating it. Sadly, I didn't take the hint. The remaining half was one of the nastiest things I have ever put in my mouth, challenged only by the other things I ate during my lunch at Vernon's in Manchester. It had been microwaved and was the texture of plasticated polystyrene. First I thought, 'Uh, nasty!' Then I thought, 'I'm not being paid enough to do this job.'

On paper, Vernon's shouldn't have been this bad. Actually, nothing should be this bad. But Vernon's does have a pedigree, or at least it claims to. Jamaican-born Allen Vernon lived in Manchester for 20 years before going to New York, where, in 1982, he set up Vernon's Jerk Paradise. It quickly became the pre-eminent Jamaican restaurant in the city. The New York Times said so. Big names went to eat there. He has signed photographs on the wall from Bill Cosby, Shabba Ranks and Rudolph Giuliani. This year he decided to return to Manchester to open this new Vernon's on an unremarkable corner site in Rusholme. Oh that he hadn't.

There are two possibilities. Either the food writers of The New York Times are a bunch of know-nothing schmucks (a possibility, I grant you) or, in his dotage, Vernon can't be fagged to do things properly. What else can explain his decision to microwave the starters? Believe me, there is nothing nastier than a pre-fried cod fritter which has then been irradiated so it leaks grease into your mouth while, at the same time, it toughens up. Nothing, that is, apart from microwaved, cooked, unpeeled chilli-drenched prawns.

I would also advise against trying the plantain or patties. I would rather self-stitch my mouth closed than eat any of those dishes again.

But perhaps even more startling (read horrible) than any of this was the desperately poor specimen of jerk chicken. Living in Brixton I know a bit about good jerk. I know about the spice rubs and the barbecuing. I know about the blackness of the skin and the moistness of the flesh and it was the taste for it that I had acquired in my own neighbourhood which decided me to train it to Rusholme for this 'authentic Jamaican bistro'. The version here also seemed to have suffered the fast-oven treatment: the meat visibly hardened on the plate. The skin was flaccid and the kidney beans in the rice and peas had split open to reveal their massacred innards.

Only the stewed oxtail and the goat curry were palatable, as in you could eat them without grimacing. In the evenings they serve some grandstanding dishes: old harbour pot roast, ackee and salt fish, for around £12 a throw. The lunch menu is much cheaper: £2 each for starters, £7 for mains. But that doesn't make it better. If someone said, 'Here, eat this plate of broken glass; it's free,' you wouldn't say, 'Ooh! What a bargain.' And £38 for three for this filthy rubbish isn't a bargain either. The Caribbean culinary tradition is neither grand, wide nor deep. But it has virtue. Here, at Vernon's, every ounce of virtue has been stolen from it.