Studio 88, 47 Whitcomb Street, London WC2H 7DH (020 7889 1966). Meal for two, including glass of prosecco: £50

Booking a table at Studio 88, a new live music bar near Leicester Square, central London, where almost all the food is served in cones, took two attempts, seven phone calls, a cancelled booking (because they’d forgotten it was press night and my pseudonym barred me entry), a bunch of emails with 15 terms and conditions (“While we welcome pre-wedding parties, we cannot accept any paraphernalia”) and a £50 charge to a credit card. We were warned to bring picture ID.

I said: “But I’m 51.”

They said: “No exceptions.”

After all that effort, we had to go. It’s on a side street. You’ll know it by the cordoned-off queue, waiting to be taken through a metal detector, for their ID to be scanned and their faces photographed. I also got frisked. I can’t lie. If there’s one thing that really encourages the appetite, it’s being felt up by a total stranger with meaty hands. Apparently, all of this is a requirement under a late licence from Westminster council – though why anyone would willingly run a business that involves setting up what feels like a small Eastern European state at the height of the Cold War beats me.

Down the stairs, past the cloakroom – £2 an item – and you’re into a nightclub space with video walls of exploding fireworks, back-lit bars and a low stage with two baby grand-shaped digital pianos, attended by two young chaps fondly murdering Adele’s back catalogue. We are shown to our table, graced by two champagne flutes. But this being under Westminster council’s licensing laws, they are crafted from beautifully moulded plastic. Likewise, when we order a bottle of wine it arrives pre-decanted into a plastic carafe that has gone that cloudy colour from a few too many runs through the dishwasher.

The plastic flutes are filled with cheap prosecco. This is part of the deal. Or as the T&Cs put it: “Each of your guests is required to have our set menu, which includes two small cones, two large cones, a side cone, dessert and a glass of prosecco for £25.” So, it’s less dinner, and more of a contraflow on the A1 just past Scotch Corner.

We’ll come back to that food. I have to talk about it, as an act of therapy more than anything else. But it would be utterly disingenuous of me to continue like this without getting to the nub of it, which is to say: Studio 88 is brilliant. I’d go back in a heartbeat. Yes, getting into the place is a Kafkaesque nightmare. And yes, the food is that killer combination of appalling ideas and dreadful execution. But at 8pm, those two pianists are joined on stage by a gang of other musicians to form one of the tightest house bands I’ve seen in years. And I’ve just come back from New Orleans, where every damn bar has one.

Armed with the GuitarTabs app, and a serious repertoire, they took requests and executed each one with wit and precision. Sometimes it required whichever pianist was leading the band to call the chord changes through the song, but they didn’t break sweat. From Stevie Wonder to Chaka Khan, Uptown Funk to Valerie, Queen to Macy Gray, they killed it. And credit, too, to the management, which clearly recognises that musicians like this cannot be flogged to death. Four pianists worked the keys when we were there, in shifts.

Likewise, the service is terrific. Managing table service cheerfully when 80% of the room is on their feet dancing, as they were from about 8.10pm, is not easy. This lot managed it with grace and professionalism. What’s more, they had to do so in the face of adversity, which is to say, the notion that putting food in paper cones, placed in spindly holders, is a good one. It isn’t. Each time they served us with a cone they made a point of putting it directly into our hands.

It took me a while to work out why. If they put them on the table they would invariably fall over, as the only one they placed down did, spilling its contents. Sadly, they replaced it, which meant we got to try their take on salmon tartare. It involved avocado, olives, currants, coconut and despair. Mine. If someone had made this for me at 3am from what was lurking at the back of the fridge, I’d have understood. But to pay someone to do it seemed to me like a terrible error of judgment.

What’s amazing is that it wasn’t the worst thing we were served. There was the sticky, gelatinous vegetable summer roll in its coagulating rice dough overcoat, which my companion said felt like “holding a flaccid penis”. (There are certain things that, once said, cannot be unsaid.) There was a cone full of quinoa gravel, burying the tiniest fragments of meat, which the menu told me was miso-glazed pork with black beans and spicy coconut yogurt. Without that seemingly random assemblage of words, I wouldn’t have known. It was a debris through which you had to pick in search of survivors. Sadly, there weren’t any.

Crab croquettes were mostly potato and had a “Mum’s gone to Iceland because she hates me” quality. They were served completely tepid, which is unsurprising given they were in a paper cone. The worst of these tepid dishes was an extra sharing platter of dim sum at a shocking £20, which reminded me of those sold in a well-known Asian supermarket chain. They’d been allowed to cool and coagulate until they were stuck to the slate they had been served on. Maybe they were trying to save us from eating them. We pushed the slate aside and leapt up to dance to Don’t Stop Me Now.

I know what you’re thinking: what exactly did I expect? It’s a dance bar off Leicester Square. Of course the food is going to be a disaster of a calamity of a travesty. Except that my experience at Albert’s Schloss in Manchester recently taught me never to make assumptions. There, the superb live music was matched by the cracking food. Why shouldn’t Studio 88 be the same? Surely it’s in my favour that I travel so damn hopefully.

None of this lousy cooking detracts from the things Studio 88 does well. The band are superb. The staff are great. I really would go back. Just don’t make me eat anything.

News bites

Restaurants offering live music are a rarity. So credit to Pizza Express which has kept true to founder Peter Boizot’s love of jazz, with venues at Dean Street in Soho and the Pheasantry in Chelsea. Recently they started programming music at a branch in Birmingham and Holborn. Now they have announced plans for a further 50 such venues around the country (pizzaexpresslive.com).

Chef Michael Caines’s country house and restaurant, Lympstone Manor in Devon, is to launch its own vineyard: 18,000 vines will be planted on the banks of the Exe Estuary, with the first batch of Champagne-style Lympstone Manor Cuvée planned for 2023 (lympstonemanor.co.uk).

London’s Goring Hotel, famously the late Queen Mother’s favourite, has joined forces with the neighbouring Passage homeless centre to create a school offering hospitality business training to the homeless. The school has volunteers from across the industry involved in training. The intention is to help them all into full-time work.

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