Roux at Parliament Square, Great George Street, London SW1 (020 7334 3737). Meal for two, including wine and service, £180
When Michel Roux Jr announced his new venture inside the Royal Chartered Institute of Surveyors on London's Parliament Square, he was at pains to say it would not be anything like Le Gavroche. There could, he said, only ever be one Gavroche. Indeed, but did he have to be so true to his word? Le Gavroche is luxurious, cossetting, over the top, camp, indulgent, delicious and joyful. Roux at Parliament Square is the opposite: assured and professional, certainly, but also drab, dreary and dull. When I say that a party of chartered surveyors would feel very comfortable here, I don't mean it in a good way. It feels like the restaurant that political lobbying built, or at least that the idea of political lobbying built. Let's open a big fancy restaurant, they said, just an MP's fart away from the Commons, where lobbyists can marinate politicians in Château Lafite and sticky veal jus and perfect crème anglaise. But the political wind has changed direction and one wonders whether they will ever come.
Upstairs is a bar which is furnished in golf club chic, though without any of the glamour. It is thousands of pounds of heavy furniture and glowering banquette. It is the kind of room that senior management sits in before being summoned to be told they've been canned. The ground-floor dining rooms are another orgy of beige. It looks like someone has been invited to go crazy with a John Lewis charge card. I can't believe the people responsible for this place stayed awake long enough over the visuals to approve them.
Against this background, the food was always going to have to work very hard to take off, and it never quite manages it. It is all professional, well executed and – a foie gras starter aside – error free, though the latter was calamitous. The liver was rendered dry and featureless under a dusty pistachio crust, as though it was the interior design realised in food. When the only thing worth talking about on a foie gras dish is the braised rhubarb, you know something's very wrong. Other starters were better: roast quail with hazelnuts, crunchy pickled radishes and a scatter of pomegranate was an evolved riff on textures. A tranche of confit salmon with crab in a jelly tube, cannelloni style, with samphire was fresh and inoffensive.
Best of the mains were fillets of John Dory on a stew of caramelised chicory and spiced polenta, carefully flavoured with orange. Less impressive was a fillet of veal with a sweetbread as overcooked as the room was underdesigned (have I made my point yet?) and a "smoked pomme mousseline" which did not deliver on its name. Lamb with Jersey Royals, violet artichokes and a tongue salad read better than it ate and was declared fine. But is fine good enough at £55 a head for food? No, not really.
It was all so un-engaging that I found myself intrigued by a monologue on the women's loos by one of my companions whose father had been an architect involved with designing restaurants. Get the lighting in the ladies' wrong and women will think they look awful and insist on leaving before dessert. Get it right and the party will stay. And that can be the difference between profit and loss. Me? I only go to restaurant toilets to wee. Hey ho. Apparently, the lighting in the ladies' here is something they have got right, though we were staying anyway for what proved to be the high point, especially a passionfruit soufflé with a white chocolate and rum sorbet, and a fine chocolate mousse with a very good banana sorbet.
I am a huge fan of Michel Roux Jr. His kitchen at Le Gavroche has been staggeringly consistent and has shepherded vast numbers of serious cooks into kitchens across Britain. He never lets a mastery of technique get in the way of an instinct to feed. He gives a damn. But here, in these sepulchral rooms, all of that leaks away. Having eaten here once, would we be moved to do so again? No, not on our own dime or even that of an eager political lobbyist. That says it all.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
