Telephone: 020-8741 1177
Address: 111 Hammersmith Grove, London W6
Open: All week, lunch, noon-3pm (4pm Sat & Sun); dinner, 6-11.15pm (10.30pm Sun)
Price: About £50 a head with drinks.
Wheelchair access and disabled WC.

The recipients of a newly transplanted organ, it was recently reported, often take on the personality of the donor. This is the finding of a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, who posits the case of a health food-obsessed young woman who rushed to the nearest KFC after receiving the heart and lungs of a daredevil biker who died in an accident with some uneaten chicken nuggets about his person.

Until someone has performed a more rigorous clinical trial - an organ exchange between Cliff Richard and Pete Doherty, say - we will treat this claim with caution. But could it be that a restaurant transplanted on to the premises of a failed business takes on the character of its predecessor? If so, might this explain the existence of graveyard sites, those apparently prime pieces of real estate where restaurant after restaurant perplexingly fails until Tesco Metro comes calling?

Chez Kristof stands on a site I know well, having lived bang opposite it in the 80s. Back then it was a long disused factory bearing the name of Universal Bearings, and it was empty for another decade before Sam and Sam Clark, the couple behind Moro, opened up there as Maquis. Maquis started very brightly, but before long one or other Sam fell pregnant and left the kitchen, and standards quickly dropped. Before too long it closed, at which point it was bought by Jan Woroniecki, owner of the brilliant Baltic, who departed from his Polish roots to turn it into a cool, modern brasserie with smart deli attached.

It's a big, square room - too big, perhaps, for the cosy feel you want in a neighbourhood joint - cleanly done out in white and maroon, and so dimly lit (infrared nightfinder to table seven) that the target clientele must be middle-aged men of power looking for a discreet pre-coital venue to take the mistress.

Given the combination of a talented restaurateur and a spot surrounded by moneyed professionals desperate for a swanky local restaurant, on paper Chez Kristof looks a goldmine. And yet ... as suggested by the dearth of punters the night we went, something about it isn't quite right.

"I'm not having you say a bad word about it," said my friend, a regular here, as the two of us sat side by side at a banquette, drinking a deliciously Ribena-ish beaujolais, like a couple of toy dog-wielding queens in Cap d'Antibes. Why, I asked, are you a big fan? "Not really. It's the house prices: we can't afford to lose it."

I'm sure there's no danger of that, and our meal was neither overpriced nor poor, but it fell short of the excellence I've come to expect from Woroniecki. The problem, I suspect, is confusion about the cooking, which can't quite decide whether (the night we went was the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq) it's Chemical Ali or Chemical Sally. The menu is packed with gutsy, peasanty dishes (calves' brains, boudin noir, ox cheek bourguignon), but suffers from a prissiness in the execution.

Having said all that, the starters were fine. My friend had a good, opinionated steak tartare with toast, cornichons and capers, and my assorted charcuterie was a generous portion, though it would have benefited from more variety.

Main courses were a more mixed bag. My friend ordered Dover sole with artichokes, but thanks to the lousy acoustics the waiter didn't hear him and brought a dish he'd asked about - shoulder of hogget (one- to two-year-old lamb, in fact, as the menu irritatingly assumes we'd all know) that was marginally overcooked and had a gratifyingly garlicky kick. My pot-roasted monkfish with Jerusalem artichoke, bacon and foie gras (not the cure-all for bland cooking some believe) was one of those dishes in which the ingredients merge into a medley that is far less than the sum of its parts.

There's no doubting the owner's attention to detail (the breads and tapenade were great, and at one point a chap strolled in with a tray of newly shot game birds), but on this form Woroniecki lacks the sure touch for the Gallic that is shown at his eastern European ventures. Chez Kristof, like Maquis, got off to a flyer - a rabbit casserole I had soon after it opened was sensational - but, as with the troublesome site on which it stands, it seems to have lost its bearings.