Address Apex City of London Hotel, 1 Seething Lane, London EC3
Open: Mon-Fri, lunch noon-2.30pm, dinner 6.30-10pm.
Price: About £60 a head for three courses and wine.
Wheelchair access & disabled WC.
Telephone 020-7977 9500.

When that fabled gourmand Samuel Pepys observed in his diary entry of November 9 1665 that it's "strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody", there are sound reasons to assume he hadn't just walked home from Addendum. One is that the restaurant was not to open for another 340 years. However, even were Pepys to be deposited by Tardis at this patience-trying place, he would not walk the few yards back to his house on Seething Lane and record such a reflection. What he might write is, "Strange to see how a pretentious dinner gets on everybody's tyttes." By the bountiful grace of God, it certainly got on ours.

And so to bread, the one aspect of the meal that chef Tom Ilic allowed to speak for itself, without any fiddling and fussing, and thus by many moons the highlight of our feasting. Alas, what followed appeared designed to incite the diner to frogmarch Mr Ilic the short distance to the Tower, and there to bang him up in leg irons until he shall sign a pledge henceforth to use his talent more sensibly.

Of the room itself - tucked away behind the lobby of an unappealing new hotel, as the afterthought of a name suggests - little complaint need be made. Admittedly, it looks like the set of a poor BBC hotel drama series, with faux marble pillars, huge mirrors, antique floorboards and slatted wooden walls. But most modern hotel dining rooms plump for this business-class lounge look, and this was at least brightened up by lavish displays of fresh flowers. And though some of the waiters carried the faint air of demotivated blankness common to those working in half-empty hotel restaurants, the sommelier was excellent and she made good suggestions about an impressive range of wines available by the glass.

It was not until we took our first pepys at the menu that things took a turn. "I never want to come here again in my life," is a quote you don't generally hear before a dish has been served, yet when my friend spoke these words, I knew why. "It's the 'hand-picked' Cornish crab that's got you going, isn't it?"

"That and the 'diver-caught' scallops," she replied.

How do people who write menus presume we punters think such items make the journey from sea to land? In the beaks of highly trained homing cormorants? If there is something profoundly affected about this needless detail, the menu and the dishes ordered from it seemed far more so. Ilic's style unnervingly combines the offally butch with the prissily effete, that crab coming in a roulade topped with fey lettuce leaves, in turn beneath an acrid apple crisp, the ensemble floating in a "fennel and Granny Smith gazpacho", which my friend compared unfavourably to a McDonald's apple pie.

My starter saw, lined up from left to right as if awaiting inspection, a pancetta crisp, pickled beetroot, a horseradish soufflé and a tiny piece of seared mackerel, all very dainty, and all tasting of very little indeed.

"Did I say I never want to come here again in my life?" said my friend, as knives so peculiarly shaped you needed a 2:1 in cutlery manipulation to use them were laid on the table. "I'd like to say it again. This is the twattiest restaurant in Christendom."

The main courses failed to disabuse her of this opinion. Admittedly, her "homemade linguine" (as if, at £18.50, it might be Buitoni?) with artichokes and poached egg wasn't too poncified. Yet, despite the truffle oil, it verged on the bland. As for my main course, which brought together various bits of lamb, at this my friend squealed: "Oh my God, it looks like a pile-up of organs."

Pepys, a man rather easily surprised, wrote once of a certain W Bowyer who came to Seething Lane for dinner that it was "strange to see how he could not endure onyons in sauce to lamb". I wonder what W Bowyer would have made of an overcooked cutlet alongside a gonadic item in an evil-looking gravy beside a dramatically overspiced "aubergine cannelloni" and some "turnip confit". The one simply cooked ingredient - a thick chunk of saddle of lamb served beautifully pink - was great. On the whole, however, I think W Bowyer would agree that there are far more irritating ways to abuse food than by dousing it in an onyon sauce.