Gilgamesh, London NW1

My waiter has a diamond set into his front tooth. My carved wooden chair has carved wooden arms that end in carved wooden hands clutching carved wooden knobs. The legs are claws, resting on a raised wooden platform. I look up to take in the enormous warehouse-style room with its retractable roof and hand-carved frieze, only to be blinded by glaring banks of club lighting moving from blue to red. In one sweep of my head, I count 34 members of staff hovering around the 50ft-long, hand-crafted lapis lazuli stone bar. A DJ rocking gently at his raised dais makes 35.

Blimey. Not just a restaurant, Gilgamesh is also a lounge, bar and Oriental teahouse installed in 15,000sq ft of the historic Camden Stables Market. The place looks like a Babylonian-themed film set, with its ornate pillars, and two three-ton statues of the legendary Babylonian winged lion.

The relevance - ancient Mesopotamian part-god-part-human meets modern nightspot on Chalk Farm Road - escapes me, but, I suspect relevance is not, um, relevant. With a reputed £12m spent already, and room for 500 diners and drinkers, Gilgamesh has to make a serious splash in a highly commercial pond in order to survive.

Suddenly, there is a horrific screeching in my ears. A freight train is moving past the window at eye level, pulling containers from Cosco, P&O and China Shipping. Or are they just shipping in more customers? They turn up in tribes: the boys slapping backs; the girls super-tanned and sparkly in tight bodices and lacy skirts. Or perhaps the containers are filled with exotic ingredients from far-off lands, destined for the Gilgamesh kitchens.

The menu is pan-Asian - no, I don't know why either - and highly derivative, with its sushi, dim sum, miso fish and Thai salads echoing Nobu, Man Ray, Buddha Bar, Hakkasan and Cocoon. Tousle-haired chef Ian Pengelley has risen again after his own Gordon Ramsay-backed Pengelley's failed, and is much in evidence in the open kitchen, sending out duck and watermelon salads, chicken gyoza, and crispy squid with garlic and chilli salt.

The night gets off to a flying start with an icy cold ziggurat cocktail of watermelon muddled with vodka and a touch of chilli (£7.50), and little maki roll appetisers of tuna, wasabi cream and flying fish roe that are intense, creamy and focused. The sushi chef continues to set the pace with two fingers of tuna nigiri, featuring sculptured slivers of fresh, pale, fatty tuna. It looks like chutoro from the tail-end of the belly, which would make it a bargain at £3. A salmon and avocado inside-out roll (£6) comes without theatrics; it's just very good, fresh sushi from a real pro.

Food comes Wagamama-style (in no particular order), which means next up is a substantial Thai rare-beef salad (£6), a generous serving of seared-outside-rare-inside sliced steak in a well-balanced dressing of fish sauce, lime juice, chilli and herbs. Two touches make it more traditionally Thai: the presentation on raw, white-cabbage leaves, and the final, textural, scattering of ground roasted rice. Everything has been done correctly, but with little point: the beef itself is tough and utterly tasteless.

Service is shoo-fly; you have to keep waving people away. I am asked eight times for my wine order, and the wine person is so overwhelmed by the need to impart his own information that he fails to hear me when I do order. Instead of a Mercurey, I get a 2002 Chateau de Rully by Comte R de Ternay (£35), but I go with the flow, and am rewarded with a very pleasant suggestion of almonds and cherries.

Dim sum arrives hot on the heels of the beef, with fragrant, freshly made prawn har gau (£5) full of good, bouncy prawn; and pork and prawn siu mai (£4) that are tiny and disconcertingly mushy.

Miso sea bass (£21) is roasted in a curl of the new-leaf-about-town, hoba, from the Japanese white-barked magnolia tree. It is the high point of the night, the delicate flesh taking to the miso marinating like a fish to water, rendering it moist, pearlescent, and nutty.

From topsy we go back to turvy again with a passion fruit rice pudding (£6) that is little more than a wet, sloppy, rice gruel, oddly flavoured with both passion fruit and sultanas. A very weird dish.

The sheer pressure of hoping to fill this enormous space with paying customers must equal the stress of having to serve them. The mix of music and theatre and energy is stimulating; but there is an overall air of seediness, from the "red-carpet" entrance complete with security guards, to the legions of food-minders who charge between tables talking at top speed into their earpieces.

So don't go for the food alone; but if you go for the phenomenon, hit the cocktails, concentrate on the classic sushi and dry-ice sashimi, and get into the Bronx-cum-Buddha Bar groove. You would have to be dead to not have fun.

13/20

Gilgamesh, The Stables, Camden Market, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1, tel: 020 7482 5757

Lunch and dinner served daily. Around £90 for two, including wine and service.

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