Bar humbug

The thing about a bar is, it doesn't have to be a restaurant as well. In Casablanca, I don't recall anybody in Rick's Café Américain actually eating a meal. In all the thousands of scenes set in bars in the heyday of film noir, amid all the femme fatale treachery, the crooning and scheming and nicotine villainy, you seldom saw Alan Ladd or Richard Widmark perusing the à la carte menu. It should be possible for a bar to concentrate just on mixing fancy drinks and adjusting the ambient music, dishing up nothing more than Twiglets for the starving. But London bar impresarios aren't satisfied with such limited ambitions: their places must be multi-operational, all-format venues for drinking, eating, dancing, chilling, posing and grooving.

Which is, I think, the problem behind The Loft, a new haven of peace in the commercial pandemonium of Clapham High Street. It's located on the first floor above a more-than-averagely-horrible Tesco, and is an impressive sight. Pitched somewhere between a 1980s lower-Manhattan loft conversion and a reconstituted parking lot, it's a triumph of industrial chic: breeze-block walls, wide-open spaces, cool lighting, dark brown banquettes, small wooden tables and a huge glass wall that runs the length of the bar. You can adopt a sophisticated pose by this window, sipping a Putinka vodka and looking down over the frowsty bars and Tex-Mex eateries of Clapham North, perhaps dreaming of finding a less grotty neighbourhood some day.

The Loft is the new offspring of James and Andy Campana, whose highly regarded Brixton bar, Plan B, features a dancefloor and DJ. The new joint is more mature and serious (you definitely can't dance here) and their restaurant promises "a dining experience on another level" (geddit?). The kitchen is run by Marianne Witt, who trained at the Glasshouse in Kew, and the menu promised some unusual treats: chorizo with caramelised onions, wild mussels with star anise. Unfortunately, it just didn't deliver.

My friend Stephen Bayley's battered plaice goujons with home-made tartare sauce were deliciously fishy, although the batter could have done with longer in the deep-frier; but my endive and crisp-braised oxtail salad refused to perform. Some unidentifiable lumps of tepid meat lay in supine melancholy on a dozen endive leaves surrounded by tiny shards of apple and root vegetable in walnut oil and mustard dressing. Everything you want oxtail to be – sticky, fibrous, gelatinous shreds – just wasn't there. The elements sulkily refused to combine into an organic whole.

Our Spanish waitress, Sonia, whose charming attentiveness is the restaurant's secret weapon, recommended a plummy Barbera D'Alba with a fumingly alcoholic bouquet, and things looked up. Forgetting my rule of never ordering a steak while on restaurant-critic duty (it doesn't give the kitchen a chance to show off), I ordered the "Côte de boeuf, 19-day hung, with a red wine and shallot sauce". Doesn't that sound good? What arrived was the bog-standard steak and chips (with tomato) they used to serve at Berni Inns in the 1970s. OK, its texture was loose and tender, so it may have been hung for three weeks, but gosh, it was dull.

Stephen's "Handmade ravioli stuffed with rabbit and porcini, served with wilted rocket and basil on slow-cooked caramelised onion" also promised more than it delivered. Three pasta sandcastles, resembling no ravioli I've ever seen, sat mutinously on an onion mush. "I think of ravioli as little parcels like edible Jiffy bags," said Stephen. "This is pasta, it's home-made and I can taste the rabbit, but it needs a sauce. I was expecting something much more delicate." I agreed. I hate to penalise a restaurant for serving food the wrong shape, but you can't apply a subtle ravioli sauce to pasta lumps the size of coffee mugs.

My pudding panna cotta, surrounded by a satellite of port-poached baby figs, looked lovely but confirmed my suspicion that the seedy, grainy essence of figs doesn't suit creamy milk pudding; it cried out for raspberries. A chocolate pot with lime granita went down well, despite the evident elderliness of the lime. As Sonia gazed reproachfully at my last uneaten figs, I registered that no one at all was eating around us, though the place had filled up with drinkers. However much they sell it as a "dining experience", it had been a bar all along. A lot of effort has gone into transforming this place from nothing into something rather cool; but at present it's a place for trendy drunkards rather than discerning noshers.

The Loft, 67 Clapham High Street, London SW4 (020-7627 0792)

Food
Ambience
Service

Around £90 for two, with wine

Side orders
Southern comfor

TRINITY

The set lunch, including glazed pork belly with carpaccioof pig’s head, chive mash and sprouting broccoli, is good value at £15 – things get more pricey at night.
4 The Polygon, London SW4 (020-7622 1199)

UPSTAIRS

The formula is simple (only three choices on the fixed menu) and the prices are great value – which explains why the restaurant recently won a Michelin Bib Gourmand.
89b Acre Lane, London SW2 (020-7733 8855)

LAMBERTS

Provenance is all at Balham’s best restaurant: try the Mersea Island seafood, Denham Estate game and Herdwick mutton.
2 Station Parade, Balham High Road, London SW12 (020-8675 2233)

TOM ILIC

Fillet of beef, oxtail raviolo, caramelised root vegetables and bone marrow for just £14.95? No wonder Tom Ilic won a Good Food Guide value-formoney award.

123 Queenstown Road,London SW8 (020-7622 0555)