Jan Moir Are You Ready To Order

Foxtrot Oscar in lower Chelsea was one of London’s famously louche restaurants, but how would I know? If I am ever in that area I am buying pillowcases in Peter Jones or a fresh card of navy buttons from their most excellent haberdashery department. I am not drinking gin at one in the morning and wondering if that man in the balding velvet jacket is Joanna Lumley’s ex-husband or Günter Sachs the playboy.

S used to go, of course. Hanging with the homies in their flowered shirts and matching ties, eating new-fangled hamburgers and doing the twist to early Blondie. Indeed, every swinger in town used to turn up at FO sooner or later, drawn by the late licensing hours and the scruffy, boozy conviviality encouraged by cosy wooden panelling, a tiny bar and lots of tables. There was also a genial mine host, one of those maverick old Etonians who pop up in catering now and again, and usually rather wish they hadn’t. Thus his place became a magnet for low-level SW3 aristocrats whose timid bohemia set the tone and the culinary standard; dodgy comfort food and lashings of pop, ra, ra, ra. FO was also popular with chefs, who would eat there when their own evening service was finished. Gordon Ramsay and the crew from his Royal Hospital Road restaurant a few doors down were all regulars. And when Foxtrot Oscar came on the market recently, Ramsay could not resist fishing out some loose change from his back pocket and putting in a bid. You know, there are lots of good reasons for buying a restaurant, but sentimentality isn’t one of them.

‘What have they done to this place?’ gasps S, as we step through the storm curtains on a Tuesday night. ‘It looks like the dining room of the Knutsford Travelodge.’ I’m afraid he has a point. The new décor is tragically corporate and bland, while it is obvious that nearly every expense has been spared. Cream wallpaper oscillates with hideous blue and brown stripes; tiny, wipe-kleen tables are clustered together in school desk rows, set out in a long, narrow space with all the atmosphere of a dentist's waiting room. Downstairs is more of the same, only even more depressing - if you can imagine such a thing. We are shown to a table in the middle of the ground floor, an experience akin to sitting in the fast lane of an M6 of waiter traffic. The staff are very nice but seem, in these early days, detached and terrified in equal measure. Around the margins of the room the kind of men who still wear blazers, and look like they once dated Fergie, toy with plates of ballottine of foie gras with quince chutney and look stunned. The old customers, face to face with the new restaurant.

Head chef Gemma Tunley, under the tutelage of chef de cuisine Mark Sargeant, has put together a simple menu of bistro favourites. Potted shrimps, crab cakes, rillettes of smoked salmon and chicken liver parfait are included in the selection of starters, while rib eye steaks with snail butter, Toulouse sausage and mash, hake and chips, lemon sole and Foxtrot fishcakes appear in the mains. Soup and salad sections feature the usual suspects such as French onion, green pea, Caesar and tuna nicoise, while there are also a trio of pies – fish, braised beef and potato with goat’s cheese.

Nice? Somehow…it isn’t

It all sounds very nice, doesn’t it? Yet somehow, it isn’t. The food at the new Foxtrot Oscar is curiously insubstantial and sometimes almost as bland and tepid as the décor. A prawn cocktail has a nice chiffonade of iceberg lettuce and a dice of green apple tossed through it, yet it remains largely tasteless, on account of the vapid dublin bay prawns. A bowl of French onion soup has a rich, Bovril-type undertow that is not entirely welcome, although honourable mention must go to the delicious fresh bread and butter. I can’t fault a blanquette of lamb main course, served with a pitch-perfect white sauce spiced with a whiff of nutmeg, pleasingly bitter little navets, baby carrots and potatoes - especially at a price of £10.50. However, a dry leg of confit Goosnargh duck plonked on top of a pile of beans and carrots is not a cassoulet, as cheekily advertised on the menu. Cassoulet is one of the world’s best bistro dishes; this is nowhere near it.

And then we had pudding. The clatter of forks and clink of glasses, the eternal pad-pad-pad of waiters as they make their way up and down this thin ribbon of a restaurant; all the noise and everyday irritations of just being alive and getting old and sitting opposite S melt away in the face of Foxtrot Oscar’s puddings, which turn out to be very good. A firm, voluptuous lemon posset is served in a glass with a pool of lime syrup and scatters of lime peel on top, with two fingers of buttery, homemade shortbread on the side. A daily special of chocolate tart is also a revelation; a perfectly glossy, thick chocolate filling poured inside a crisp pastry base. Both are exceptionally well made; the posset not too thin or sharp, the tart not too cloying or sweet.

The wine list features a few dozen bottles, with an even mix of new and old world. The house red is a Vin de Pays D’Oc, the kind of thing you get on tap in an all-inclusive ski chalet holiday. The better reds include a Crozes Hermitage, while there is a really decent Chablis sold by the (£7) glass. A trio of sweet wines includes a Somerset Pomona from the Somerset Cider Brandy Company, at £6 a glass.

In short, perhaps this is just the latest concept from Ramsay, who may want to roll out a collection of local bistros in the same way he will roll out his line of public houses. His Narrow pub in Limehouse deservedly won a Bib Gourmand in the Michelin listings announced this week, but I fear Foxtrot Oscar has some way to go before anyone will pin a medal on its oddly formal little chest. The room is too small, the bill is too big and although the food may be better than it once was, this is a restaurant that has lost its soul in the refurbishment.

In catering terms it is a perfect example of how far we have come, how much we have lost and what is really important about dining out.

• Foxtrot Oscar, 79a Royal Hospital Road, London SW3. Tel: 020 7352 4448. Dinner for two, excluding drinks and service, £50.