4-6 Garrick Street, London WC2 (020 7379 0412). Meal for two, including wine and service, £100

Blimey. Branches of the Aberdeen Angus Steak House chain have had a makeover. The Garrick Street branch is like Waynetta Slob in Gucci. Not real Gucci, mind; the tacky knock-off stuff you'd buy in the market on your summer holidays. There is overly clean, dark-wood panelling, bare brick of the sort used to build new bungalows on the outskirts of Swindon and a continuous line of red neon around the top of the walls which casts the room in the sort of glow I last saw in Amsterdam behind a big picture window framing a woman in her pants who was for hire. Am I selling it to you? Am I?

Of course we cannot assume on looks alone – or, to be more precise, I can't just assume it's a nightmare without having eaten there. Having done so, here's what I can say. In my view, it's a nightmare – the sort that has you awakening with the bed sheets bunched in your hands.

Not everything was appalling. The 10oz rib eye was fine – not without flavour, not tough, served medium rare, as asked. Likewise the service, by a nice Hungarian chap, was good. I worry he's wasted there.

But that good steak set everything else into relief. A starter sharing platter with rings of deep-fried calamari appeared to have all the texture and flavour of surgical support hose. A bolus of breaded chicken breast was desperate and dry, skewers of prawns simply odd. Spare ribs were the colour of an old lady's velour sofa and edible, in the sense that I ate them. This cost the best part of £15, the best part being £14.95. That's the point.

Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses are not cheap. We had one glass of wine and one dessert and ran up a bill of more than £90. Even the rib eye, in my opinion, doesn't make that acceptable. The New York strip was dense, flavourless and unrested. Why import your beef all the way from Argentina – feel the carbon footprint – simply to do this to it?

Worse were the béarnaise and peppercorn sauces, which were possibly the nastiest things I've put in my mouth since a game of truth or dare at college (don't ask). We must assume they made them from scratch, which makes the fact they tasted like they had been reconstituted from powder all the more remarkable. The peppercorn sauce, in particular, was vile. It looked like the sort of thing you might extract from a long-untended wound.

You could achieve the effect of their onion rings at home by opening a bag from the freezer. Chips, unforgivably, were lukewarm and flaccid. A lemon meringue pie had cold, soggy pastry.

I have long wondered how these places stay in business. I've wanted to run into tourists who have unwittingly taken seats in there and bellow: "Save yourselves!" No amount of polished-wood panelling or red neon changes any of that.