The Glade at Sketch, London W1

The Glade at Sketch isn't so much a restaurant as a satire on the human appetite for novelty. What kind of satire you take it to be will rather depend on your mood. My guest, The Independent's art critic Tom Lubbock, who, when his petal-strewn dessert was served, hissed that it "violated the dignity of the flowers", seemed to approach the thing in a Swiftian mode of indignation. But I'm not sure his concern for the civil rights of violets will be widely shared, and to be honest we're talking affectation and silliness here, rather than the darker kinds of folly. Myself, I took it in a Wodehousian spirit - richly appreciative of the more ridiculous aspects of modern manners, but uninclined to get fretful. Whichever form the satire takes it is utterly dead-pan in delivery. You could almost think that they're not in on the joke at all ... which surely needn't spoil it for the rest of us.

A new addition to Sketch's stable of bars, gastronomic restaurants and cake shops, The Glade (which operates at lunchtimes only from Monday to Saturday) occupies a windowless cube of a room with a skylight ceiling. It has, we are informed, been newly refurbished for the opening but since the decor is one of those Changing Rooms makeovers that feel dated before the glue-gun has even begun to cool, it is already looking a little démodé. Give a 15-year-old an unlimited budget to decorate his bedroom and he might come up with something this effortfully characterful - sideboards made out of gnarled tree branches, swags of velvet, chequerboard carpet in shades of green and brown and an acned flush of crimson pocked with diamanté sprigs and sprues. On the day we ate we also had the unmistakable vocal ormolu of Brian Sewell floating over us from the next table - an excellent comic grace note - but sadly I don't think he's available for all diners.

The menu - devised by Pierre Gagnaire for the head chef Anthony Garlando - isn't exactly nervous about frills and furbelows either. We start with (a) cuttle fish and Welsh mussels, marinated with ginger, tomato, tamarillo, beetroot, hake cream and green apples, and (b) eggs en cocotte with peppered prawns, serrano ham and smoked milk. "The egg is running," the waitress warns me apprehensively as she takes my order. In fact the egg is lurking, sitting at the bottom of a tall preserving jar in a pale swill of albumen. It appears to have been cooked by getting a sous-chef to breathe heavily on the underside of the jar, and though the prawns are excellent the combination of velvety Serrano ham with slippery egg yolk is not an entirely successful one. I get vivid flashbacks of this dish for the rest of the day - and not in a good way. Tom's squid and mussel dish arrives dyed bright purple by the beetroot, but the promised piquancy of those ingredients has been tamed by the amount of cream in the dish.

Main courses are a little more successful. Tom grumbles a little about the sweetness of his Shimizu chicken supreme, which is served up beneath a buff coat of mustard-coloured glaze and flanked by corn puddings, but he clears his plate anyway. My skate, dusted in "chickpeas flour" and served with a gremolata spiked with capers, "guerkins" and almonds, is a fine piece of fish (they certainly cook better than they spell). But the green papaya butter is undetectable by my palate and the apostrophes of liquorice foam that sit on either side seem like an anxious afterthought about the dish ("Er ... what if it's not exotic enough?"). The onion tart that the waitress has pressed on us as a side dish is like a vol-au-vent gone wrong - a sickly mound of very sweet caramalised onion topped with an aerosol foam of horseradish flavoured cream. Like the room it's all striving just a little too hard to be different.

For desserts we order from a selection of Petits Gateaux from The Parlour - Sketch's patisserie - and for the first time the dishes unequivocally match their pretensions to their achievements. A coconut-dusted dome of white chocolate mousse concealing a dense apple marmalade is really exceptional and though Tom is suspicious of his rhubarb tart topped with a gleaming, trembling disc of almond cream, it strikes me as being a genuinely successful marriage of flavours - rather than a free-for-all orgy. Then the coffee arrives in white rubber cups and droopy, doughnut-shaped rubber saucers and we both start to corpse. This is a restaurant that tugs continually at your coat sleeve seeking congratulations for its sophistication - and if you have a taste for the human comedy you may feel that it's worth a visit. Then again, even though the Glade doesn't come remotely close to the notoriously stratospheric prices at Sketch's main restaurant, you may feel that £30 a head without wine is a little too much to pay for a joke, however good it is.

The Glade at Sketch, 9 Conduit Street, London W1 (0870 777 4488)

Food
Ambience (for comedy)
Ambience (for taste)
Service

£108 for two including wine and service (£60 without)

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