Flank at the Cow, 97 Dyke Road, Brighton BN1 3JE (01273 772370). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £50-£70

A TV executive told me recently that the competition for new commissions has become so fierce that the people charged with developing ideas are, out of desperation, writing proposals for factual shows which are un-makeable. Oh sure, they look plausible. They even make sense when read out loud. But they are full of unrealisable promises of jeopardy, of emotional storylines that could not be guaranteed. What’s on the piece of paper could never appear on screen.

I fear the same thing has started happening in certain restaurants; that what’s written on the menu could never appear on the plate. Take those at Flank in Brighton, as displayed on its Facebook page. It is pure food lust fashioned from syllables. How about “spiced beef shin donut – pan stock – peanut” or “Kentucky fried artichoke – pickle cress mayo”? There’s XO chicken thigh with crispy skin and black mayo or torched black bream with chilli brown shrimp. Beef short rib comes with bone marrow ketchup and roast baby gem lettuce. You could have a side dish of “bone marrow fried gnocchi” and, to finish, “Dr Pepper sticky bourbon cake” with bourbon burnt butter and cream.

It reads like a plausible version of the dishes thrown up by the Brooklyn Bar Menu generator, a brilliant comedy online tool which did the rounds not long ago. Every time you clicked “refresh” it offered up the likes of “homespun sungold jam with artisanal oyster balls and rubbed anchovy” or “market chorizo tartare”. It was a glorious collision of buzzwords and ingredients. Except I could actually imagine eating the dishes on Flank’s menu. In the days before going there I did a lot of imagining. Unfortunately, I had to carry on doing some of that imagining afterwards, too. It’s not quite as damning as it sounds.

Because, while the young team at Flank aren’t quite equipped to execute all of their menu yet, I’m going to take the things that worked as a marker of very good things to come from them in the future. Flank defines itself as less fully grown-up restaurant than kitchen in residence. It exists only in the letterhead on the brown paper menu, and the graphics used on Facebook and its rather less useful website. (Oh, the terrible violence that website does to the English language.)

It is virtual branding for an operation, led by chef Tom Griffiths, which occupied another Brighton pub before landing here recently at The Cow. It’s a blocky, modern pub up the hill from the seafront, where the sound system booms, tattoos are often Celtic and the wines come off a laminated card. You can have any white you like as long as it’s chardonnay, sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio. No bottle costs more than £28. Food orders are taken at the bar.

It’s the dishes listed as snacks and bites which punch you right between the eyes. No beef shin donut or chicken thigh with XO sauce tonight, but there are other very good things. Sweet and sticky chicken wings are a little unwieldy for being unjointed, but are crusted powerfully with cracked black pepper and deliver a mighty kick. For £5, the portion is also enormous. So is that of a “pressed pork loaf” for the same price. It’s two bricks of a gloriously spiced and seasoned terrine, spun through with leeks accompanied by their own crunchy, lactic pickles.

Two apple wood-smoked cheese croquettes are ambitiously vast for the lightness of the béchamel within. There’s no way you’re picking one of these up without getting liquid cheese down your wrists – never a good look. But somehow they managed to get them into the deep fat fryer and out again on to the plate. There is the crunch of a celeriac and apple slaw, with a fine high acidity and the savoury whack of fermentation to cut though all the dairy fats. “Crispy Kentucky fried pig ears” manage still to have a pleasing gelatinous quality to them beneath the seasoned crust, as if determined not to hide their piggy lughole origins. This is boisterous, decidedly masculine cooking, which isn’t afraid of the salt cellar but manages to stay the right side of hypertension. These dishes cost us £22 and would be enough for two.

I wish we’d left it there. From then on it was all unexecuted menu language and unrealised dreams. Beef short rib, we are told, is cooked for 24 hours, before being finished on the kamado barbecue. Sadly, those 24 hours are wasted in a water bath so that the short rib, a cut which can handle a day’s moderate heat, has a jellified quality unmitigated by the quick kiss of flame. With it is a thick splodge of fridge-cold “bone marrow” ketchup. The bone marrow makes no impact, but the fridge does. At that temperature it is a crash of high acidic notes and low sugar. Braised baby gem lettuce leaves have left the best of themselves back in the braising liquor.

I try to establish in what way the “Shabbat half chicken” is Jewish, as the menu claims. Did it own a sizable Philip Roth collection? I study the pale flesh and wonder whether it has been drained of its life blood through kosher slaughter, a great way to ruin a fine chicken. In the head chef’s absence, the kitchen can’t enlighten me. Later, he contacts me to say it was indeed a kosher chicken: very odd given the whole crispy pig-ear thing. It comes with a coffee spice rub and has also been finished on that barbecue, and would not be recognisable as Shabbat chicken to any of the Jewish mothers I know. “This, you call Shabbus chicken?” And so on. The main failing, as with the beef dish, is over-salting. A convention of cardiologists could warm their fees on this food. Bone marrow-fried gnocchi come in a gravy the colour of night, and the saltiness of an ocean. Triple-cooked chips are the thickness of a balustrade.

And that sticky bourbon cake? It never happens. All the desserts are off, because of an oven malfunction. They rustle up a weird frozen rhubarb thing. Let’s move on. So, a game of two halves. A dinner of promises kept and broken, of ambitions achieved and unrealised. And yet somehow the good stuff gives me cause for optimism. At least some of that menu writing was on the money. It worked. For that, I’ll give thanks. It’s what “restaurants” squatting cheaply in pubs are all about

Jay’s news bites

■ Elsewhere in Brighton, Riddle & Finns remains a standard bearer for the sort of seafood you want to find here at the beach. Since I first reviewed the original, tucked back in the Lanes, it has spawned a sibling on the water’s edge. At both places it’s all the good stuff: oysters and mussels, squid with chorizo and chilli, fishcakes, fritto misto and, of course, towering fruit de mer. All this and
a long list of fizz to help it slip down (riddleand finns.co.uk).

■ Regular readers will know I have a small obsession with laksa, that glorious chilli-boosted coconut milk broth from Singapore, often loaded with seafood and noodles. So I have to announce the arrival of The Laksa Kitchen, which will operate out of a cafe in Kentish Town, north London, for two weeks from 30 June. Four varieties of laksa will be on offer (thelaksa kitchen.co.uk).

■ Chef Richard Neat, a cult figure in London restaurants, is to return to Pied à Terre where he made his name. He’ll cook there for one week in September to help celebrate its 25th anniversary (pied-a-terre.co.uk).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1

Jay Rayner’s new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments (Penguin, £6, or £5.10 from bookshop.theguardian.com), is out now