I am well aware that dispatching a bottle of dessert wine sounds excessive but I hope that, by the time we get there, you'll see it for what it was: an act of desperation, an attempt to salvage something, damn it, anything, from a lousy night out. After dinner at Union-Undeb, a members-only club in Cardiff with a public restaurant, moderate inebriation seemed like a small victory. It wasn't that everything was catastrophic. It was more tiresome than that, the accretion of irritations, which combined make a meal a chore, rather than a pleasure.

Union-Undeb - the second part of the name is Welsh for the first - is an interesting proposition: a funky members' club, opened by the manager of the Manic Street Preachers. It looks right, situated down one of those Gothic Victorian red-brick alleys where people go to throw up after a night out. Inside, it looks right, too: with dark wood veneer and Welsh slate on the floor, and brickwork which is almost as distressed as I was by the time I left.

The restaurant is on the second floor and, as the lift opened, a waiter approached carrying furniture. They were moving tables to accommodate a large party. They were, it transpired, moving our table. No matter: our table was the worst in the room, the kind restaurants put in just to get the numbers up. They told me it would be fine and sent me to the bar. Half an hour later, and unfetched from the bar, my companion and I trailed back upstairs. They had, at least, recognised we wouldn't fit on the first table and were clearing another one.

Menus appeared. A waiter asked if we would like to order drinks. No, we said, we'd like to order food. I'm not taking food orders, he said. Why not? I haven't got my pad and pen. Then go and get it. He got his pad and pen. We ordered food and wine. He returned with a bottle and put it on the table, unopened. I'm out of glasses, he said. He returned five minutes later, waving glasses in the air. They were too warm, apparently, having been in the dishwasher. Finally we get wine.

An hour and 10 minutes after our booking time, we get food, too. Mine was a terrine which was advertised as coming with Poilane toast. The waiter, who clearly hadn't read the menu, said it was meant to come with brioche but it was finished. He offered, instead, bread rolls which tasted like they were made at lunchtime. Yesterday.

All this would have been fine if the food had been, but it wasn't. My foie gras and rabbit terrine was a distinctly ungamey, unsubtle slab. My companion's starter of scallops came over seasoned on an un-desalinated mash of salt cod. Main courses were no better.

My lamb was OK, but the vegetables were on nodding terms with raw. My companion's beef fillet came with over-cooked roasted carrots and salsify that had an institutional back taste to them.

My pudding, a pineapple cake with caramel sauce, was the best thing eaten. A sherry trifle with a thick layer of neat jam was just plain nasty and hence unfinished. None of this was cheap. The bill would have come to £100 for two, were it not for us deciding to drown our sorrows in a glass of dessert wine. But, 'Sorry sir, we don't do it by the glass.' Why not? Everyone else does. Oh sod it. Just bring us the whole half bottle. And he did and we finished it, and by now I think you understand why.

· Union-Undeb, 23 Womanby Street, Cardiff, Wales (02920 343 433). Dinner for two, including wine and service, £100.