JSW, 20 Dragon Street, Petersfield, Hampshire

The initials stand for Jake Saul Watkins, the 37-year-old chef-proprietor of JSW who began operations in a tiny side-street restaurant, and moved into this 17th-century coaching inn round the corner two years ago. He's already picked up a Michelin star ("Contemporary cooking: flavourful, well-sourced and confident," they say) and much enthusiasm in other guides. Simplicity, they all say, that's the ticket with JSW, simplicity and classiness.

As you open the door of JSW, you get the classiness all right – a virginal hush, compounded of discreet lighting and the murmurous conversation of people sitting slightly too far apart, at slightly too-big tables. The pale wood beams are undoubtedly classy. The walls are off-white or cream or magnolia – one of those paint colours called "Hint of a Tint" or "White? Not Quite" – and hung with simple, possibly too simple, charcoal drawings of female nudes, apparently by the owner's sister. The room's centrepiece is a reception table that should be a bar but isn't; I guess it might look vulgar amid the pale-vestal wood and not-quite-cream. It's all hushed and dull and depressing and underlit, like a posh chapel of rest.

The staff are charming, though, and bring excellent home-made bread and a monster wine-list, stuffed with expensive clarets, and the small (four starts, four mains), expensive (three dinner courses for £47) menu. My guest had scallops with butternut squash purée and rosemary. She let out a squawk of protest with her first mouthful: "It tastes just like the décor." The scallops were amazingly flavourless – seared but unseasoned and with no taste of shellfish. Hovering over the purée was a small frothy velouté of ... "Just cream," said the waitress. I longed for a velouté of mushroom or asparagus to lift the dish into some zone of taste; but it was just cream. At least it went with the walls. My "three textures of pork" were more interesting: the porcine troika were a roundel of black pudding, nicely cooked and softened in the jus from the fibrous tranche of pork cheek beside it, and a cube of pork belly on apple sauce that was crisp and tasty.

The waitress arrived and looked puzzled to see some remnant bits of uneaten scallop on my companion's plate. She seemed genuinely upset to be told it lacked taste to the extent of pointlessness. You can imagine the enterprising, Michelin-starred young Mr Watkins inspiring people with his hushed and classy procedures. It wasn't her fault that sometimes they don't work.

From the choice of four mains, I went for venison with Jerusalem artichoke and fresh truffle. The sliced venison was wonderfully tender, livid purple on a green bed of curly kale, surrounded by a gloopy jus with trace elements of black sand. Was that the fresh truffle? The waitress assured me it was in there somewhere. But the meat needed the flavours of its own juices, the curly kale wanted seasoning and the artichokes had insufficient presence.

My date had honey-roasted duck with lentils, smoked-shallot purée and cep. Sadly, blandness was again the main ingredient: mushroom with no taste, lentils ditto, and sliced duck which was fine in texture but – I checked the vestiges of skin – no trace of honey anywhere. It was like entering a world where vampires had sucked out all the taste, leaving you with a hint of what it used to be: like the hint-of-cream walls around us.

Both dishes were accompanied by copper saucepans containing a mustard-and-cress salad with, respectively, cured venison and cured duck, a kind of counterpoint or descant to the main event. My cold venison had been, I was assured, cured in liquorice and black treacle, but it's hard to discern these flavours on cold, slimy meat. Why would you supplement a dish of hot venison with a side-order of cold venison? Make it a starter, yes – but a side-dish? The cured duck was very raw, and redolent of cold ham, and was the last thing you felt like eating alongside the hot version.

Things improved with the promise of new-season rhubarb with vanilla panna cotta and ginger, combining three favourites of mine in a cocktail glass. But the rhubarb was a very tart sorbet, and an unannounced crumble lurked under tepid whipped cream with bits of fruit, so there were temperature and texture issues. The chocolate and olive oil delice with malt ice- cream was as off-putting as the name suggests, the slightly bitter chocolate surrounded by a slick of oil and salted by tiny slices of black olive. Even when you're as used to cheffoidal experimentation as I am, you can still be startled by the awfulness of modern pudding ideas.

JSW is a hushed, cream-walled shrine to simplicity that's, at present, fatally mired in blandness, "classiness", anonymity and poor combinations of texture. This is not what brought the talented Mr Watkins his Michelin star, and I suspect he knows it. If he stopped being so determinedly a purveyor of inoffensive good taste, we'd all be a lot better off.

Food
Ambience
Service

About £130 for two, with wine.

Tipping policy: "No service charge. All tips go to the staff"

JSW, 20 Dragon Street, Petersfield, Hampshire (01730-262030)