Jan Moir Are You Ready To Order

The restaurant hard sell is becoming increasingly hard to bear. At Moti Mahal, S and I have had a bottle of celebratory champagne and a lavish array of dishes, including a starter of achari jhinga; a trio of king prawns marinated in pickling spices. Tasty in a puckering and diverting way, yes, but S nearly falls off his rocking horse when he realises they are £6. Each. Yet we plough on through a dinner that costs over £200, making us probably the biggest spending table in this sparsely populated restaurant on a wet Monday night in August.

Is this enough for them? No. After ordering coffee, a waiter approaches us with a drinks menu. ‘Sir, how about one of our lovely antique whiskies?’ he asks, in the manner of someone about to open his jacket to reveal rows of wristwatches hanging inside. Antique? Pressurising diners into bumping up their bill with overpriced after-dinner drinks is one of the oldest tricks in the restaurateur’s book. It leaves a taste even sourer than Moti Mahal’s cardamom and rose petal baked cheesecake, which S has to send back on the grounds that it is possibly old enough to sit its driving test. While I am marginally diverted by the whisky tasting notes - a rare malt with ‘honeyed pine nuts encrusted in barley on the nose’, which sounds more like a nasty case of acne than a drink – the overwhelming feeling I have about this place is that enough is enough, and that I am quite possibly going to be frisked and relieved of any remaining spare change on my way out. Yes, times are getting tough out there. The downturn in the economy is beginning to bite, and the catering industry is always one of the first casualties. Yet restaurants that up-sell in such dogged manner cannot expect to thrive. British customers, in particular, just don’t like it. And our evening here had all started out so well!

Moti Mahal is situated in the middle of Covent Garden, in a handsome building adjacent to the capital’s central masonic lodge, the hulking monstrosity that is the Freemason’s Hall. The restaurant, with its budget chandeliers and crescent of cream leather sofa in the bar area has aspirations of being upmarket. Crockery is of the oblong, rippling flag shape and tables are set with white cloths, ochre runners and a forest of glasses. Requests for tap water instead of bottled will result in the swift removal of some of these glasses, which are replaced with two tumblers of tepid tap; that’s hard to say at any time, but particularly after a mouthful of achari jhinga. Other starters we try include Kenkdey ki Tikki; three florin-sized crab cakes, bursting with lime and ginger flavours, served alongside a finger of turbot crusted with coriander and carom and a jammy pool of chutney.

This refrain of gathering streetfood-style snacks together then jazzing them up with sauces and whatnot is repeated in Bhuney Aloo aur Mutter ki Tikki (tandoori stuffed potatoes, pea cakes flavoured with cumin and baby samosa-type savoury pastries dressed with yoghurt and chutney) and Sagar Rattan, which are scallops seared with onion seed and licked with a tamarind glaze, served alongside tiny steamed seafood dumplings called momos. Curiously, all this sounds more appetising than it actually tastes. The scallops are good and there are the occasional bursts of delicious, sunny Indian flavours, but in their desperation to make these delicacies upmarket, Moti Mahal only succeeds in strangling the soul out of this food and swamping palates with a blizzard of spices and flavours.

A suspicion of fowl play

However, the real reason we have come here tonight is to sample the restaurant’s new season spiced roast grouse, which forms part of a game menu which they promote every autumn. A special menu insert lists the restaurant’s four game specials, and states that ‘we collect our wild game from local estates’. Yet the first dish on the list is guinea fowl with stir-fried chilli and gingered broccoli. The Duchess of Argyll was a game bird, intensively farmed guinea fowl is not. Red-legged partridge with a saffron sauce? The partridge season does not start until 1 September, and the birds are not at their best until some time after that. The pheasant season begins even later, on 1 October, but that has not stopped Moti Mahal including Tandoori Jungli Murga on their game menu, which they describe as pheasant marinated in home made spices and thyme, roasted in the tandoor and served with a potato and pomegranate salad. The waiter insists that the birds are fresh, but it seems unlikely that this is true, as no game dealer worth his licence will sell before the season begins.

At least the grouse is in season, even if something nasty seems to have happened to the Kerala roast grouse en route from the moor to the Moti, quite possibly involving a mid-air collision with the wrong end of a 747. It arrives as a plate of broken bits, heavily caked in the yoghurt and coriander mix typical of a tandoori bird. If you put these odds and sods together, and somehow ignored the fact that some bits taste weirdly of lamb, you would end up with half of a strange looking creature, possibly Jurassic, with limited resemblance to a grouse. This cost £32, which is more of a call for the police than a call of the wild. The pheasant dish is inedible; half of a deep frozen old creature from last year I presume, with meat fibres that will not break down, even when cooked. I have rarely been served a more disgraceful meal in a restaurant. It’s not just that the chef had a bad night, its more that Moti Mahal seem to be practising an entrenched culinary charade.

Our champagne is one I’ve never come across before, an Audoin de Dampierre NV (£40). It is perhaps a little too sweet, with very small, electric bubbles. The Riesling Grand Cru Schlossberg Dom Albert Mann 2003 has a lovely floral bouquet and matches Indian food well, should you have any good Indian food for it to accompany. We didn’t. And I could grouse about it all night.

• Moti Mahal, 45 Great Queen Street, London WC2B 5AA. 0207 240 9329. Dinner for two, excluding drinks and service, £100.