10 Lime Street, London EC3 (020 7929 4590). Meal for two, including wine and service: £90

The Factory House is one of the most irritating London restaurant launches of the past five years – an achievement given the stupidities of this city. From its skull-crushingly tiresome slogan – "A refuge for the modern day industrialist" – through the clocking-on system at the door and the overwritten menu to the food that has a diploma in underwhelming, it's one huge squelching misfire.

What baffles me is how all this was allowed to happen. I can well imagine the "concept meetings". I can just see an excruciating presentation by sharp chaps from some Hoxton design consultancy throwing around "lookbooks" full of Victorian typography, slabs of Samuel Johnson's diaries, and the "found art" of paperwork from an abandoned city notary. What I don't understand is why nobody stood up and shouted: "This is cobblers – we're opening a bloody restaurant, not a film set for a lousy Guy Ritchie adaptation of Dickens." Obviously, nobody did shout anything at anybody. They just gave them the money. That may well be the last they see of it.

It has been spent on turning a basement space opposite the Lloyds building into a cross between an adolescent steampunk fantasy and a branch of Jamie's Italian. It's all beaten copper and desperation. We shove the card given to us by the embarrassed eastern European greeter into the Victorian clocking-in machine and then head down into the basement space. We are handed menus printed on an eight-page newspaper in FT salmon pink.

I could now fill the rest of this column by typing out the guff that's in there. Breakfast comes under the heading "Before the longcase strikes twelve"; there's a section entitled "In order to get the juices flowing". I mean, really. Never mention juices on a menu. It's a short hop from there to the word gusset, and then what do you do?

Next up: "To commence [being a series of freshly prepared starter plates]." Well, that's a relief; so much better than those starters prepared a week last Thursday. It's when I get to the steaks section under the legend "From our grillsmith" that I hunt for a flame with which to torch the menu. Grillsmith? What the hell is a… oh never mind.

You could excuse the posturing if the food was a genuinely bold attempt to do really something a Victorian trencherman might excitedly get up to his armpits in. Instead it is a grim mix of cack-handed and prissy.

I watch a cook spray a pre-cooked loaf of bread with water before shoving it in the oven. It arrives sliced. Some is warm. Some is cold. Some is both. Some is dried out. We order bacon and thyme-flavoured popcorn as a nibble. It tastes of neither but is so grossly over-salted that we give up. Then my starter arrives completely devoid of flavour: a dull, fridge-cold piece of poached trout with "brown shrimp fritters" that don't taste of brown shrimp. Or anything else.

Not everything is dismal. The pastry in a fig tart that's part of a starter may be limp, but the accompanying wood pigeon is accurately cooked. Likewise with the roasted partridge and the guinea fowl that held up the main courses. But both are let down by the same overly sweet, envelope-sticky jus, and too much faff. I'm not a fan of filo pastry. It has all the texture of potpourri and none of the aromatics. Fashioning doll's-house barrels out of it for a shrivelled partridge leg is a lot of hard work to no good effect. As a modern-day industrialist looking for a refuge I end up feeling terribly misunderstood. Enough with the dainty, already.

Things end as they began with a slightly dry blackberry and apple crumble and a truly dismal Lancashire rarebit, the cheese mixture overloaded with mustard and underloaded with cheese so that the topping is too loose and runny. As my companion says: "It's cheese on bloody toast. How can you get that wrong?" It's quite simple, really. You put all your effort into the overwrought concept and not enough into what's coming out of the kitchen. I take my Factory House docket from my pocket and clock out with glee.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place