Telephone: 020-8780 1811
Address: Embankment, London SW15

Putney Bridge is swish. The outside is swish. The inside is swisher. It is a rare phenomenon in English restaurateuring. It is housed in a building built for the purpose, and one that makes a statement. Whether or not the statement appeals is up to you. To me, it looks like a glass-and-steel glam cruise liner designed by Norman Foster, tied up to the Putney embankment, and it does appeal to my glitzier side, which I do my best to keep hidden, but which keeps showing through like a toe through a darned sock.

Putney Bridge has had a bit of a chequered history since it opened shop four or five years ago, but Anthony Demetre moved into the kitchen a year or so back, and word has been filtering out that there's really some exceptional cooking rattling out of the kitchen.

The first glance that I had of menu certainly suggested that Mr Demetre is not short of ambition (with prices to match: £45 for three courses at dinner, or£69.50 for the seven-course Menu Dégustation), and has a particular penchant for the multi-element dish - viz sauté of frogs' legs with smoked pork flan, warm salad of ventreche, parsley and garlic, or cuisson milk scented with pineapple sage, or wild turbot baked in a salt crust with hay, rosemary and orange with winkles, palourdes, razor clams, mussels and spaghetti and cooking juices emulsified with olive oil.

You could argue that the kitchen is to be congratulated for keeping the customer informed of what is in the dish, so there will be no nasty surprises, but to be honest, my response was to wonder how on earth is he going to get all those on a plate? The answer came with my first course of - deep breath - lasagne of pumpkin, cepes, Iberico pata negra, pumpkin biscuit, beurre noisette and balsamic vinegar, all stacked like a small heap of autumn leaves. I have to say that this was a really classy piece of cooking, all of the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness on a plate, warm, subtle, lovely sweet/musky flavours mulching into one another, with a fabulous interplay of textures. It absolutely rehabilitated the pumpkin for me.

I was dining with Maev, an Irish princess, who with a certain amount of rapture set about a rather more orderly plate of of stuffed squid with a light cream of salt cod, petit gris snails and parsley cromesquis. There was no doubting the provenance of the squid, or the excellence with which it had been cooked. It was sweet, delicate and tender. The salt cod sauce, too, was an inspired idea, and the little parsley balls nicely done. But the snails? I'm not too sure about them. Snails are becoming about as ubiquitous as pine kernels, and about as welcome, in my book, which is not very. I just about like a snail on its own as first course, but a snail as second fiddle, as a garnish, well, it looks more interesting on the menu than it does on the plate. Snails smack of effort.

And effort is certainly one aspect of of Mr Demetre's food. To bone out a partridge and then reform it into a sausage shape with cabbage and foie gras, and bind it in cling-film or foil to keep it in shape while it's being cooked, so that it can be sliced in half on the angle to form the architectural centre of a carefully casual piece of plate design involving parsnips, grapes and walnuts, strikes me as filled with effort. I have nothing against effort in the kitchen. That's one of the reasons why we go to restaurants, but on occasion you have to query the result. I couldn't help wishing that a bit more effort had gone into hanging the bird properly, which would have given a bit more flavour, because that would have given much more point to the fine saucing and the rest of the plate furniture. I would make a similar observations about a plate of "warm chocolate moëlleux, barley milk ice cream, Jijona turron and cereal tuile". I couldn't fault the technical skill, but just thinking about it made me feel tired.

I looked with envy at the classic simplicity of Maev's plate of cheese, chosen from a tremendous selection on a trolley, under delightful and well-informed instruction. I had earlier envied her magnificent wild duck, which showed how it could, and should, be done, just carved off the bone, with an inspired turnip tatin and parsnip purée, and left to bathe in a well-wrought, gamey sauce beefed up with the juices of the bird and livened up with dried cherries. As a celebration of game, for which Mr Demetre has an obvious affection, devoting a whole subsidiary menu to this sub-class, it was in the top class.

You don't go to, or escape from, somewhere like Putney Bridge without a severe denting to the credit card. A well-stocked, pumped-up wine list only increases such tendencies. And there's no point complaining about it. If you don't like paying the prices, don't go there. There seemed to be plenty of people prepared to do so. We came up with £226, having slightly over-cooked things on the wine front, albeit without regret. After all, how often do you dine with a princess?

· Open Lunch, Tues-Sun, 12 noon-2.30pm, (Sun, 12.30-3.30pm); dinner, Tues-Thurs, 7-10.30pm; Fri & Sat, 6.30-10.30pm. Menus: Tues-Sat, lunch, £22.50; Sun. lunch, £25.50; dinner, £45 and £69.50. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access and WC.