Vanilla

Address: 131 Great Titchfield Street, London W1
Telephone: (020 3008 7763)
Meal for two: including wine and service, £110

Vanilla is a restaurant for people who aren't interested in food. It's for people who are interested in their own reflections; for those who think that shiny surfaces and witty takes on monochrome flock wallpaper motifs are very now. It's for women who totter and men who only regard it as a good night out if they can get a prostate massage off the vibrations from the sound system. Certainly I hated the bar on first sight. I reckoned it saved time. The room was a white out: white walls, white floors, white tables, white noise. If you dropped something white - an albino tiger, say - you'd never find it again.

I was somewhere north of London's Oxford Street, and for no obvious reason - I hadn't tortured any kittens recently, mugged any old ladies or voted Lib Dem - I had been sentenced to an evening in my very own version of hell. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been one of the cooks. They have to prepare meals for people who surely couldn't give a toss. Because if the punters did care, they would be somewhere else. They wouldn't be here wondering which member of the kitchen staff thought putting a sickly Mr Whippy-style sweet vanilla foam on top of a potato crisp was a good idea, when it was the least amusing thing to come near my mouth since my dentist attacked me last autumn with the hurty Novocaine syringe and the whirring drill. It wasn't an amuse bouche. It was a cry for help.

Not that all the food here is irredeemably bad. Only half of it is. The rest is like the name of the place: so very forgettable, so very vanilla. The menu reads like somebody has wandered London's restaurants randomly choosing dishes because they sound grown-up: lobster bisque with poached prawns; twice-baked Comte cheese souffle; black-leg chicken and wild mushroom fricassee with sauteed asparagus. What do these dishes have in common? Nothing, save that you'll find them on the menu at Vanilla.

Some were just silly. A courgette flower risotto was a loose, over-seasoned bowlful, mined with lumps of al-dente courgette with one sad flower lying on top, as if begging to be interred in the mush below. Another starter of seared scallops on cauliflower puree was an inexpert rendition of a dish that can be found much better elsewhere.

For my main course I ordered the sea bass with an Amaretto and vanilla sauce, because it sounded like something devised under the auspices of a care in the community order. On the upside you couldn't taste the Amaretto. On the down side you could taste the vanilla. Weirdly, out of this gastro-cacophony emerged one dish bearing some rather fine slices of roast lamb which were pink, well seasoned and bore a nice ribbon of crisp fat. They came with a pillow of underwhelming mash that was so large I could have buried my head in it and pretended I was somewhere else. I was tempted. I finished with a caramelised pineapple ravioli which is less a dish and more a game of word association played by someone with dyslexia. The other dessert was something creamy out of a soda siphon stuffed into a brandy snap tube.

For these three courses they charged £30, which is very London and very now, all of it served by a dour Eastern European waitress, which is also very London and very now. As we were leaving, the bar had filled up with women each flashing their tattooed coccyx, and bronzed men leering at them. Soon the bar will become a private club. I was even offered free membership. Weirdly, I declined.

· jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Tim Atkin's wine column returns next week