McCoys Rooftop at the Baltic
Address: Gateshead, Tyne & Wear
Tel: 0191 440 4949
Meal for two incl wine and service: £130

I am often asked by what criteria I choose the restaurants I review. Well here's one: did they bother to answer the phone when I attempted to book a table or did it click over to voicemail? Granted, I have particular issues around leaving voicemail messages with restaurants. They are to do with a) choosing pseudonyms and b) being too dozy to recall which one I used when they call back. Even so, does it not undermine one's confidence in the service a restaurant might offer if the very first point of contact, booking a table, is handled by an answer machine? A human being saying hello at the end of a phone genuinely is the least you can hope for.

And so I can say to Fisherman's Lodge in Newcastle that I won't be reviewing you this week. God knows I tried, really I did, but I got so bored listening to the monotone message on that damn answer machine of yours. I've just tried it again and, oh yes, there she is, reading out the opening times. Even when I did leave a message you took hours to call back. Instead I went to McCoy's at the Baltic and found myself wishing that you had got your act together. I have no idea whether Fisherman's Lodge would have been any better, but a bad lunch - and this one was - can make me terribly wistful.

I had high hopes. I often have these. One day they'll make a medication to deal with it. Maybe I can undergo a high-hope bypass. For now, though, I thought mine reasonable. This restaurant, perched atop the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, with a commanding view across the Tyne to Newcastle and all its redeveloped wonders, is an offshoot of McCoys at the Tontine in Staddlebridge. The McCoy brothers have been running their restaurant in a ramshackle old building for three decades now and, while I have never eaten there, it has been held up as one of those treasured outposts of good taste. My companion, David, had eaten there many times and said it was famed for doing all the simple things well.

Nothing we tried at the Baltic was simple, and I'm struggling to think of anything that was done really well. The space, a big glass box, is dramatic and I can see why it has been a contender for the best location gong in our OFM awards, but they've been over enthusiastic with the palm trees, as if it were a suburban garden room whose edges needed softening. The whole point of this space is those hard lines, the very man-madeness of it all. It should be accented, not covered up.

I feel the same way about the ingredients. It's not that I believe this kitchen can't cook. I'm sure they can, given the right menu. But they are trying far too hard and attempting things for which they don't have the technique. It is in the nature of what I do that few plates of food appear truly innovative to me and many seem derivative. (See how I suffer!) I have no problem with chefs who pick up ideas from each other. That's how cookery works. But please get it right, especially if you are going to charge £41 for three courses (dessert is £6, the other two £35).

I have seen scallops and cauliflower puree dancing together all over the country, and it is a combination that works. Here it was a stumble rather than something graceful. The scallops, though accurately cooked, were over-seasoned, and the purees lacked richness. They were drying in the mouth, not luscious. A risotto of crayfish and chorizo from the lunch menu - three courses for £19.95 - was simply poor. It hadn't been cooked out, leaving the rice all bite and no squidge.

Our main courses, one pork and one beef, were almost exactly the same dish, though it would have been impossible to tell from the menu. Every single element on the plate was listed - eight on each - so that words swam before our eyes. A well-written menu is like good erotica: it leaves you to work out the best bits for yourself. This was just like bad porn, everything described in graphic detail: here some loin, there some cheek, over there a cooling dribble of mustard foam.

Two oblong plates arrived, scattered with lumps of animal protein: a cylinder of braised something, some seared fillet, a shaft of something else, all topped with draped fronds of foliage and dabs of foamed sauce. Both looked like council cemeteries that had been left to go to seed. I could applaud the effort but not the end result. The fact is you need a big kitchen full of skilled chefs to pull off stuff this complex, plus a dining room of eager customers. A kitchen needs to be working flat out to get this right. There were only six people eating there the day I went, and a lightly staffed kitchen to serve them.

The two desserts displayed the same problems, with both a mango delice and a white chocolate mousse having a rubbery texture as if too much gelatine had found its way in to the mix. Service was cheery in a 'how did you find your main courses?' sort of way, which left us struggling for an appropriate response. 'What can I say? It was all there on the plate?' Or perhaps, 'On the table in front of me'? Dear old Fisherman's Lodge. Would it really have killed you to have answered the bloody phone?
jay.rayner@observer.co.uk