Le Monde

The fact that Le Monde has been around for three years and I've had not the slightest inclination to set foot over the doorstep says more about me than about it. Generally the George Street bars and hotels (Tigerlily, Le Monde, EH2 Tempus at the George et al) aren't meant to appeal to a middle aged codger such as I. They would claim to look "exciting, contemporary and wonderfully designed", but personally I feel they are vulgar, commodified up the wazoo, aesthetically challenged and more like the result of a interiors firm who, with no clue what to do next, just threw a kitchen sink and some glitter at a drawing board then hoped for the best.

But thematic incoherence need not imply culinary incoherence so today, for the first time, passing Le Monde I thought "Yeah, just a salad then."

The waiters were great, there was table space, service was slick and I settled down to wait for "asparagus, artichoke, roasted pine nut & blue cheese salad served with red onion chutney and lemon creme fraiche dressing" plus a mineral water and a side of chips. (Well, I was hungry and maybe the salad was going to be dinky.)

Lunch arrived quite quickly. It was not a visual feast.

It looked like yesterday's bag of Sainsbury's mixed leaf salad for one with several slices of blue cheese on the top (possibly Stilton). Somewhere underneath lurked a number of artichoke heart pieces. I only mention Sainsbury's in context because there's a branch round the corner where I know you can buy small jars of artichoke hearts in oil: earthy, with that fascinating half-way-to-root-vegetable taste and texture; an occasional antipasto treat. At Le Monde, they have artichoke that is the precise opposite, although for reasons that will become clear, I didn't retain much a taste memory - save "acerbic" - thanks to another overwhelming element in the dish.

There were a few pieces of sun dried tomato on the plate while creme fraiche and residue from the red onion chutney was smeared across the cheese. Indeed, the chutney was ubiquitious. For the flavour sensation imagine day-old salad tossed in jam, disguising everything else. After shovelling some of this into my mouth (see above, I was hungry) I realised something was missing. Technically the lead feature was asparagus? Where then was it? Eventually I found one modest spear, sadly broken in two, bright green and freezing cold as if it had been cooked at some point in its long and unhappy life, then kept in cold storage until the last possible moment. There were pine nuts, to be fair and they weren't too overcooked. I didn't even eat all the chips.

I'll run out of space soon so I just want to conclude: extraordinarily bad. This wasn't food, it was biomass.