Rating: 8/10

Telephone: 020-7010 8600
Address: 13-15 West Street, London W1
Open: All week, lunch, noon-3pm, dinner, 5.30pm-midnight (10.30pm Sun)
Price: Meal with wine, around £70-£80 a head

As readers of his autobiography, the startlingly well-written and drolly titled Humble Pie, will know, Gordon Ramsay hated his time in Paris under the aegis of fabled chef Joël Robuchon. "I was like a tortured child," he said a few years ago. "You know how arrogant the French are. Extraordinary." Extraordinary indeed.

Unbowed by this assault, Robuchon now has gone into competition with his erstwhile protege (and, perhaps more pertinently, with the Ivy next door) with a tripartite venture involving a swish, foliage-laden bar, a less formal restaurant and, upstairs, an expensive dining room.

It was to the latter that we went for dinner, and a handsome if curiously styled room it was, peppered with glass storage jars and with a bewildering range of recherché utensils hung on those walls that are not done out in black-and-white chequerboard squares. It has such a strong late-1980s feel that it put one of us in mind of a Peter Greenaway film (The Cook, The Thief, etc) and another of a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

The recent record of big-name French chefs trying their luck in central London is not good, three Michelin titans being widely ridiculed for their efforts in the past few years alone - Pierre Gagnaire for the insane prices at Sketch, Alain Ducasse for the idiocy of the concept at Spoon (mix-and-match ordering from three lists of ingredients, to create such lasting classics as roast monkfish with pickled kumquats and raspberry sauce) and the Pourcel brothers for the maniacally pretentious W'Sens.

Robuchon won't be joining them in the metaphorical stocks, I'm sure, because, even in his absence and its infancy, this is an unusually slick and impressive restaurant, and everything we ate until the puddings - all ordered from the conventional half of the à la carte menu, rather than from the more faddish side offering small tasting dishes - was terrific. The disparity in the servings was, it must be said, notably eccentric. A starter portion of excellent Iberian ham with tomato bread was colossal, but an equally delicious, fabulously fresh-tasting tartare of tuna with stewed peppers was gone in three swallows, and you'd have struggled to drown an aphid in my wife's superbly delicate gazpacho.

When an immaculately cooked quail was set before her, the age-old cry of "Hubble telescope to table four" went up, and although she loved the dish, she couldn't disguise her sense of victimhood on the arrival of my roasted rib of veal with olives and artichoke hearts - the most richly seasoned and finest veal chop I've ever eaten. It could have sated the executive committee of the British Association of Tapeworm Sufferers.

Lamb cutlets with thyme, covered with honey and cut to resemble little lollipops, were beautifully tender; roast duck with endives and an orange jus was perfectly succulent; and the mashed potato we shared was almost indecently fluffy and creamy. Those with the money and the patience for the 10-course "menu decouverte" at £80 will doubtless be in for a treat - albeit, given the progression from crab and Coquille St Jacques, via foie gras and red mullet, to lamb and quail, one that could well end in a gastroenterologist's waiting room. But what we most admired about the cooking was the lack of fuss and poncery, the food clearly being designed to accentuate not the cleverness of the cook but the basic ingredients, which were of high enough quality to justify the prices.

Having said that, two meringue-based puddings were a bit Cow & Gate-ish in texture and flavour, despite looking wonderful, with the bizarre presence on the side of a miniature Bullseye mint. That apart, the only real fault we could find was a rather flat atmosphere that will no doubt improve if and when this restaurant overcomes both the challenges of a notorious graveyard site and the Ivy's proximity to become one of the city's bustlier destination joints. On this form, it will, I suspect, be when.