67 Greenland Street, Liverpool (0151 708 2890). Meal for two, with drinks and service, £65
Camp and Furnace sounds like the name of a sweaty gay bar in Helsinki; the sort a Lib Dem front-bench spokesman might visit during their downtime on a "fact-finding" mission. In truth, it is a collection of warehouses in Liverpool, a few blocks up from the old docks and the banks of the Mersey beyond. The rest of the description cannot so quickly be dismissed. Not because it really is a sweaty gay bar, but because it has the potential to be almost anything you (and it) might want it to be. It is one of the more intriguing venues I have eaten at in a very long while; an encouraging example of what can happen when an industrial but cared-for past meets a vibrant cosmopolitan present. Is Camp and Furnace a restaurant? In the sense that you can eat there, yes. Beyond that, it all gets very complicated.
I'll put it another way. If I had eaten the dishes I was served there in some cosy urban bistro in Liverpool I would subsequently have sweated over my keyboard, desperate not to write something overtly patronising and probably, because I can't help myself, would have ended up being patronising anyway. This isn't because the food is bad; some of it is very good. It is, though, uneven and is so random in its influences as to make you wonder whether the chefs are very widely travelled, or have just been watching the dodgier bits of output from the Food Network. But it's clear to me that to write about it solely through the prism of a meal would be to completely miss the point.
After all, this is a restaurant column not a food column, and they really are different things. I used to be a regular at a restaurant near where I once lived that I loved in spite of the food. It wasn't uniformly terrible, but some of it did try your patience. The grills could be fine; other dishes were just odd, and weirdly accessorised. It made you wonder what terrible things had happened to the chef in childhood, that in adulthood he should do this to his customers. If all else failed he splattered plates with an astringent herb garlic butter – starters, mains, the occasional dessert – which could have been used to keep slugs down in the garden. And yet it was mostly edible enough to be tolerable, so that I could enjoy the rackety neighbourhood buzz, the cheerful, modestly efficient don't-give-a-tossness of the waitresses, and the drunken stumble home.
If I lived within stumbling distance of Camp and Furnace I would similarly lose many nights there, and forgive the occasional, far-less-acute lapse from the kitchen. This zigzag of warehouses was taken over two years ago by an architect, a designer and a couple of musicians, with input from James Moores of the Littlewoods family, who is known in the city for throwing wedge at its cultural life.
At one end is a huge space with the biggest public screen in the city, which has been used for everything from its regular club nights, through film screenings to the big sporting events. At the other end is another enormous space, set with long communal tables. On Sundays this is the site for massive roasts, served to 400-plus people, other special themed nights and, on Fridays, what amounts to an indoor street-food festival. Against one wall can be seen evidence of the furnace from which the place takes its name. It looks like the location for a movie set in a post-industrial wasteland, and probably has been.
Between these two is the smarter, less industrially distressed eating space. It has a functional Ikea-by-way-of-good-taste look. There's a long bar, an even longer plain wood communal table, plus a few other spots to hunker down for food in the corners. On a sunny spring day it's warm inside, though reassuringly there are cages of logs ready to be burned in the hearth when things get chillier. After all, the brisk winds off the Mersey are only just outside the door.
The menu in here is divided between "small bites", which turn out to be exactly the same as small plates or even, as it happens "starters" priced from £3.50 to double that, and "large plates" at no more than a tenner. There are influences from Italy, Spain, China and the Middle East, with a big dollop of hearty modern British.
A smoked tomato soup with crab toast is extraordinary value at £4. Just the soup – thick, sweet and sour, a pleasingly light hand on the smoke, a swirl of good, peppery olive oil to prove how well brought up it is – would justify that price. The sourdough toast layered with freshly picked crab meat seals the deal. That, and their tranche of salmon, cooked in a fiercely hot pan so the skin is practically a scratching that cannot be ignored, makes for a close-to-perfect double act. It comes with a generous smear of watercress mayonnaise, still-warm potatoes, lemon and capers.
And so to the less successful things. The salt-and-pepper squid is served underseasoned and in rings, as if in a dodgy Greek taverna off the arse end of Mykonos Town. It needs to be flat, scored pieces that curl up on themselves to hold the light batter and, more importantly, the advertised salt and pepper. Char sui spiced poussin is a well-roasted bird, but leans a little too much to the sweet, which isn't helped by the peanut slaw. It all needs a good dose of salt to pick it up. Faith is restored by a special of warm langoustine with drawn butter and, more especially, by crisp-fried potatoes with a chorizo crumb and what tastes like a drizzle of maple syrup. This is bad food in a good way. There is only one dessert, a peanut butter and jelly cheesecake, which has been the victim of a rather heavy hand with the gelatine.
So yes, an uneven lunch. But clearly this is a kitchen which can get it right when it's on home ground. Much more important is the premise: a public cultural space that weds the life of its city to eating well, and which knows exactly what it wants to be. So yes, you may occasionally eat something here that misses the mark. But I sense that, even so, a visit to Camp and Furnace will never feel like an opportunity wasted.
Jay's news bites
■ Ever since the V&A's infamous "Ace caff with a nice museum attached" ad campaign in the 1980s, it's accepted that public arts spaces should come with good eating opportunities. One of the better ones is the restaurant of the Royal Academy of Arts off Piccadilly, run by Oliver Peyton's company, Peyton and Byrne. It comes with a reliable menu of unfussy modern British staples – and some killer art (peytonandbyrne.co.uk).
■ The highly regarded School of Artisan Food in Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, has announced a series of bursaries for short courses in butchery, cheese making, patisserie and business. The bursaries are aimed at people planning to launch food businesses and cover up to the full cost. Applications must be in by 31 May (schoolofartisanfood.org).
■ For a long time the appeal of so-called "paleo" diets has been their reliance on meat. But, of course, someone had to write a cookbook to ruin it. Coming in June: Paleo Vegan: Plant-Based Primal Recipes by Ellen Jaffe Jones. Because we all know cave men just loved those sautéed fiddlehead ferns.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
• This article was updated on 22 May 2014 to correct the telephone number of Camp and Furnace.
