Jan Moir Are You Ready To Order

Where are you going? Where are you going? It is an apt enough question for this re-re-re-re-relaunched Soho restaurant, which opened on Monday after a long period of neglect that resulted in it desperately needing a sprinkle of stardust. Certainly, magic is in the air at the moment! The Evening Standard managed to review the restaurant before it was even serving meals, which is quite a catering miracle. Perhaps not quite as miraculous though as the Quo Vadis summer pudding which, like a multi-millionaire eunuch, is all bread and no berries. But wait! I am getting ahead of myself.

Quo Vadis has been bought and sold more times than a Windsor wedding, but it is now under the care of Sam and Eddie Hart, the owners of London tapas restaurants Fino and Barrafina. The half-Spanish Harts are natural-born restaurateurs in many ways, but mostly because they understand, enjoy and love good food. They are hugely enthusiastic consumers themselves. Some people might be amazed at how rare this is in the industry. Others wouldn’t, especially if they recently had dinner at Amaya or, perhaps, Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester.

From day one both the Harts’ modern tapas restaurants were a huge success and each continues to be a popular venue in the capital. However, already I am wondering if their relaunch of Quo Vadis as an English grill room is quite as sure-footed and winning as their other enterprises.

The restaurant has stood on the same handsome Soho site for more than 80 years, in a building where Karl Marx once lived. Quo Vadis is one of those restaurants that everyone can vaguely remember going to about ten years ago, but never found a good enough reason to go back. Now it has been spruced up in a breezy, classic way, but its colourful leaded windows and Edwardian menu bear more than a passing resemblance to the Ivy. Is this deliberate, or just unfortunate? The low ceiling in the 90-seat dining room is oppressive and there are slightly too many customers packed in for comfort. If the room is busy, and it is today, one can feel like a sardine slotted into a can. In addition, the proximity of customers on the banquettes means that you can hear everyone else’s conversations, which is a dreadful bore, particularly if you are sitting next door to S.

The British-style brasserie/hotel grill room menu as composed by the Harts boasts a number of dishes that fail to meet any of the stated criteria – crab spaghetti, sea bass carpaccio, pesto gnocchi and L’Ami Louis potatoes among them – but many of course that do. These include asparagus with butter, brown shrimps on toast, oysters on the half shell, veal cutlets with sage, poached eggs with artichoke, whole roast chicken for two (£30) and treacle tart.

We begin with a foie gras terrine with macerated cherries, which looks promising. However, the terrine is not well made. Part of it is silky, like goose liver, part is rough and earthy, like duck liver, and none of it makes any sense, texturally or taste-wise. It is an uneven start to lunch, in more ways than one. Crab tagliatelle is a well-loved dish which deserves a place on any menu, but not if it is creamy as it is here. Perhaps it has been muddled up with some of the crab mayo from the first course selection? Whatever it is, it seems misguided, although the pasta is good.

Grilled, roasted, pan-fried? Who knows…

Quo Vadis is the second restaurant we have been to in recent weeks offering its own home-smoked salmon – there must be a discount run on smokers at B&Q – but in this instance it does not disguise the fact that the salmon used is cheap and fatty. A main course of turbot is wildly overcooked and not as fresh as perhaps it should be. The menu states the fish is grilled, the bill claims that it is roasted; a weary S concludes that it is probably a bit of both, with a spot of pan-frying thrown in as well. And there is more awful, neither announced nor advertised, thin, cream-type sauce on top.

The aforementioned summer pudding is also catastrophic. It is constructed as if a Martian had attempted an olde English recipe while unsure if he was supposed to eat it or lag his spaceship with it. And no wonder there are hardly any berries; they’re not even in season yet.

Our fault, perhaps, for ordering it. Yet it illustrates the malaise at the heart of Quo Vadis. There is something wrong here and perhaps it is because the Harts should be focusing less on their roles as mine host and more on the food.

This incarnation of Quo Vadis is a restaurant that means well, but the Harts’ extremely capable head chef, the Frenchman Jean-Philippe Petruno, has been turning out faultless tapas for half a dozen years now. The cultural filtration process that is now going on means that he is now interpreting English dishes with his French-saucing style, and something is getting lost in translation. The Harts have been successful so far because their Spanish roots and genuine passion about Spanish food shone through in their restaurants. Launching an old fashioned grill like this is a brave move, but they need to get more in touch with their English side if they want this to be a success.

• Quo Vadis, 26-29 Dean Street , London W1D 3LL. Tel: 020 7437 9585. Lunch or dinner for two, excluding drinks and service, £80.