Dinner at the Gilbert Scott, 25th May

I'm not sure what happened in May, but things went a bit crazy. If I'm giving the impression that I constantly eat out at fine restaurants, that is not the case at all, but there just seem to have been a run of them lately. It'll be back to porridge, as granny used to say, shortly.

I'd been aware that the St Pancras Hotel was about to re-open in the near future and in an idle moment at work googled it to find that the restaurant had in fact just opened. It's called the Gilbert Scott after the architect of the hotel and is run by Marcus Wareing although he seems remarkably reticent about it and there's little mention of him on the website.

My only previous visit here was a few years ago when the hotel was derelict. G and I went on a tour of the building and it was an absolutely magical experience. I remember the staircase being stunningly beautiful, and it was sad to see this wonderful building rotting away, so I'm thrilled that it's been restored, and in my not-very-expert opinion, they've done a smashing job.

C and I agreed to go there for the "early supper" deal after work one evening (£19 for two courses, £24 for three). Walking through the front entrance one immediately finds oneself in the bar, which is spectacular. NB this is the bar for the Gilbert Scott, not the Booking Office Bar for the hotel which is also on my hit list.

I'd certainly like to come here for cocktails some time, but on this occasion we were booked in for dinner so we were taken into the main restaurant.

This photo doesn't quite do justice to the room. The ceiling is very high indeed and when sitting down, one could barely see out of the windows which open onto the front sweep of the hotel drive.

It was only about 6.00 so the dining room was fairly empty and there were lots of smartly-dressed waiting staff hovering about. We were given big paper menus which had an awful lot of dishes on them, and then in the bottom-left hand corner we spotted our early supper deal. The wine list was also quite confusing and it took me a while to notice that within the various categories, they did not proceed in an orderly fashion from cheap and cheerful to super-expensive, but were all jumbled up from a price point of view. Not helpful.

We chose a bottle of Argentinian Torrontes which at £30 was one of the cheapest bottles on the list and asked for a jug of water. Perhaps it was just me but I thought the waitress's lips curled slightly at that point. After the wine had been poured, the bottle was whisked away and I don't know where it went - it certainly wasn't nearby. Note this point because it becomes significant later...

For starters, C had the pork pie and I had Southwold sprats with ketchup. Both servings were enormous - the pork pie was more like a large slab of terrine with some pastry round the edge, and my bowl of sprats appeared to be bottomless. In fact I would go so far to say that the portion sizes were rather too big, given the lack of accompanying side-dishes or garnishes to liven things up.

For our main course we both had the Cumberland sausage and mash, which came in cute individual little pans. It did exactly what it said on the tin, and the mash was very delicious and clearly had about a pound of butter in it, but again one felt the need of a vegetable or side dish just for variety.

For pudding, C had the turkish delight cheesecake (I think she'd been thinking about it all day) while I went for the Sussex pond pudding sundae. This time, the portions were miniscule! One had to do a double-take to spot anything on one's plate. C's first impression of the cheesecake was that it was very disappointing and not what she'd expected, but then it grew on her. I got to try a bit and we agreed that it was more like a mousse than a cheesecake. My pudding was nice but nothing spectacular and I ate it in about 2 mouthfuls.

Throughout the meal our wine glasses had been assiduously topped up, but each time the bottle had been whisked away to its mystery location. I found this very irritating and over-controlling. I've had enough bad experiences with wine waiters to prefer to be left to refill my own glass. It also made it hard to judge how much we'd had - were we 2/3 through the bottle or had we finished it?

I reckoned we'd finished it, so I was quite surprised when a waiter came back and gave us a very hearty refill. On tasting, this wine was very bland, some sort of pinot grigio if I had to guess, and certainly not our zingy Torrontes! This presented us with a dilemma. We'd clearly been given two glasses of someone else's wine. What should we do? In the end we kept quiet about it (I didn't want to cause a fuss, and nor did I want to risk having to pay for someone else's stuff) and left it. They must have got us confused with another table - a pretty shocking thing to happen in a place like this. Mistakes do happen, but if they didn't have such a silly system with the wine, this particular mistake wouldn't have been possible.

We had a coffee, and then got the bill. C noticed that a £2 cover charge had been slapped on for each of us. I knew this was likely to happen, as I'd read Nicholas Lander's review of the restaurant in the FT. C asked the waitress what the cover charge was for, and we listened to 2 minutes of drivel about how the price of vegetables varied with the seasons and the cover charge was to avoid the need to change the prices of the dishes each day. I've never heard such a load of claptrap in my life and sat there trying to keep a straight face. Really, when is the last time one heard of paying a cover charge in this day and age? It just seems greedy.

Including food, wine, coffee, cover charge and service, our bill was £100 for two - yet again - but we left with a sour taste in our mouths feeling that we'd been screwed over. Before we went, I'd been wondering about taking my family here for lunch to celebrate my birthday which is coming up soon, but by the time we had finished I'd decided there was no way I'd be coming back to the restaurant in the near future. I might visit the bar though!