58 St Martin's Lane, London WC2 (020 7748 5244). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £95

Come with me on a walk up St Martin's Lane, one of the West End's lovelier streets. It runs parallel to the trashy, guano-smeared clutter of Charing Cross Road, but feels like an old town alley. Until you consider the businesses. Here's a branch of Spanish chain La Tasca, and here a Jamie's Italian. There's a Pizza Express, a Bella Pasta, a Subway, a McDonald's and a Browns. Very quietly lovely old St Martin's Lane has turned into Guildford High Street. (Kinda – Guildford main drag actually only has a Jamie's Italian, but the point about chains – they have a Nando's, an Ask, a Zizzi and so on – is made.)

I'm not one to spit instinctively on the notion of chain restaurants. Some of them do a good job. Not all the food is appalling. But in the centre of London, which has interesting offerings every 10 paces, their presence is depressing. I often find myself standing outside a Garfunkel's or one of those Chinese buffets where DayGlo pieces of protein fester under the kind of lamps that nurture baby chicks unto slaughter and want to shout at the tourists within: "Get out, save yourselves! Your colon has done nothing to deserve this. There is better."

Which brings us, or at least me, to the recently tarted-up Angel & Crown pub in the middle of St Martin's Lane. It should be a refuge from the cookie-cutter epidemic outside. Except it isn't. The pub is owned by the ETM Group, named after brothers Ed and Tom Martin, who have 10 pubs like this, and counting. The style is full-on "'ow's-yer-farver" London boozer by way of Guy Ritchie's production designer: black-painted floorboards in the downstairs bar; barmen in crisp aprons; Victorian racing prints bought by the yard up the stairs; a dining room that's a little more Farrow & Ball – which is to say, demure and restrained. It's all been designed to within an inch of its life.

Much like the menu. It bellows its food credentials by throwing dandelions into the salads and samphire on to the fish. But drill down a little and it begins to feel like a put-on job. It's like a Camden hipster who wears a straggly beard to make him look more "roots". (Mine is not straggly; it's very tidy. And I have never claimed to be roots.) Plus it's almost as cookie cutter as the menus of all the other chains up the street. That pork and green-peppercorn terrine with piccalilli? You'll find it on many of the menus of the other nine ETM pubs. Ditto the kilo pot of mussels or the Cumbrian beef or the side of poppy-seed onion rings.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, as long as the economies of scale bring benefits – and this is where it falls apart, for it isn't noticeably cheaper. Starters are around £6 or £7, with mains in the mid-teens. The food is basically fine. An asparagus soup was a little more green indeterminate vegetable than the very essence of asparagus but, you know, OK. It was not worth getting smelly wee for. A wooden board of "kiln-roast salmon" with hunks of beetroot and horseradish crème fraîche was a solid bit of shopping.

A venison pie was all right, and I liked the way the crust was supported by a sawn-off length of bone. The cooking of lamb rump was adequate, though the lovely Jersey Royals were beyond crushed. A chocolate parfait and a cream-bulked banoffee pie were so uniform as to make me wonder whether they had been bought in. (I was assured not.) Pork crackling from the bar menu was appalling – the skin as rubbery as baby-buggy tyres.

But here's the thing. All of this cost about the same as a meal at 10 Greek Street, which is a four-minute walk away and would not leave you using words like "fine" and "OK". Or at Quo Vadis, where a Jeremy Lee pie would not have elicited an "all right". Or at Duck Soup or, in the other direction, at Terroirs…And so on. The point being that chain restaurants are absolutely fine – until there's an alternative, when they no longer are. Right now the Angel & Crown is one of the better choices on St Martin's Lane. But that really is damning it with faint praise.

Jay Rayner's eBook, My Dining Hell, is available now from Amazon and all eBook retailers, £1.99