Sonny's, 3 Carlton Street, Hockley, Nottingham (0115 947 3041)
Three courses, including wine and service, £80

I went to Nottingham and ate uncooked black pudding. This is what stays with me from my lunch at Sonny's, and I'm not happy about it, for a number of reasons. First, I visited the city as an act of solidarity. A Channel 4 property show had described it as the second worst place to live in Britain and, by reviewing a lovely restaurant, I wanted to prove otherwise. Secondly, I have defended the occasional London bias of this column by arguing that, outside the capital, standards are patchy and that it serves no one if I go all the way to, say, Nottingham, merely to find a restaurant that misses the mark. Which is exactly what has happened. Thirdly, eating uncooked black pudding is really nasty.

Not that the restaurant which served it is. Sonny's is the sort of comfortable place anyone with a passing knowledge of Britain's modern urban bistros could describe: white walls hung with monochrome photographs, white paper tablecloths, Frank Sinatra on the sound system singing 'My Way'. Ditto with the menu. I could write one of these under heavy sedation. A soup, a terrine, a couple of salads, one dish of more ambition in the starters. Salmon, chicken, rump of lamb and fillet of beef in the main courses. There is nothing wrong with any of this: reassuring familiarity can be a virtue. But if you are going to set out your stall just so, the cooking has to be faultless. At Sonny's, it wasn't.

Wanting to stretch the kitchen, I chose the starter of ambition: pan-fried scallops and black pudding with lime and apple sauce, not in itself an original combo, but one which takes skill to get right. The scallops were seared outside and close to raw inside, which did not trouble me, but beyond the seared crust of the black pudding the innards were cold. I ate the scallops but left the black pudding and explained why to the maitre d'. To his credit, he apologised and reduced the bill.

Next up rump of lamb, which I'd been told would be served pink and was, but only in one slice, as if the kitchen were now running scared of the tiresome bloke on table five with the rareness fetish. It came on a 'tatin' of red peppers and caramelised onions, which was a complete failure. The pastry should have been crisp and flaky. Instead it was a soggy stodge, perhaps because everything had been piled on top. The failure, as with the starter, was one of execution rather than conception. Both dishes would have been lovely if they had been done right - tatin on the side rather than underneath - but they weren't.

The pudding, a lemon curd tart, was just a failure. I was not in the kitchen to see how it was made, but it ate as if a hard, rather than crisp, shell had been prebaked then filled with lemon curd on service. On to this had been sprinkled sugar, which had pooled to a great depth in the soft curd before being blow-torched to black. Anybody who has ever spooned neat lemon curd from the jar will know how cloying it is.

With relatively modest tweaks in the kitchen, Sonny's could have been exactly the sort of place I was looking for. Instead, it stands as a more potent symbol than any great Michelin-starred joint could, of where restaurant culture in Britain is today: it was so nearly, but oh so not quite. Which is a bloody shame.