The Grill at Brown's Hotel, W1

It dawned on us that there might be mismatch between enthusiasm and information at The Grill at Brown's Hotel when my wife ordered braised beef with creamed potato and caper dumpling and the waiter asked her how she'd prefer her beef. Either he wanted her to be unusually prescriptive about her requirements ("Six hours at 155 degrees, please, and take the lid off the casserole for the last fifteen minutes") or he hadn't a clue how the dish was cooked. It was a pity really that he didn't also ask, "How would you like your dumpling", because then my wife could have said, "Light, fluffy and tasting faintly of capers, please," and might have been spared the gluey bolus of wallpaper paste that eventually arrived. Then again his question wasn't really a question at all - more an involuntary twitch of waiterliness, brought on by the general air of servile faffing that characterises the style here.

I imagine it's meant to go with the clubland panelling and the big silver-domed roast trolley which is trundled up to your table as you order. It's all part of Sir Rocco Forte's attempt to give Brown's a face-lift without losing the patina of Imperial high style which goes with its history; The Grill was London's first hotel restaurant. In line with this, executive chef Laurence Glayzer (who's also done time at the Savoy Grill and the Ritz) has designed a menu that mixes English chop-house standards with modernised treatments of British ingredients. So you can order a mixed grill (waiter rather vague about the contents), a Dover sole (£28) or calves' liver and bacon or go for something a little more worked up, such as free-range chicken breast with a light hazelnut infusion (£17.50) or a breast of duckling with honey and black peppercorn glaze. Whatever you order, though, comes with quite a bit of silver-service theatre.

My wife's butternut squash velouté, for example, arrives to be painstakingly poured next to the table, ladle by small ladleful. The waiter does it as if he's decanting nitroglycerine on the top deck of a moving bus - which has a certain comic value to it. Unfortunately it also turns out to be an extremely efficient way to make a hot soup tepid. The by-now-lukewarm temperature is matched by the soup's mediocrity of flavour, with not quite enough depth in the stock to lift the essential blandness of the squash. My mosaic of pheasant with wild mushrooms and chestnuts is disappointing too - the mealy sweetness of the chestnuts and the gamey bite of the pheasant failing to do any great service for each other.

Main courses are better. In the end my wife hadn't specified how she wanted her beef cooked but when it comes it is yieldingly tender and well-flavoured. Perfect comfort food for a cold night, but for the presence of that caper dumpling impersonating something you might peel from the underside of a rotting log. I had been sceptical about the use of something as tartly characterful as capers as flavouring but the problem had been resolved by using them in such sparing quantities that they can't be tasted anyway.

My seared fillet of sea bass with razor clam chowder is robustly good - the chowder reduced to a sauce rather than a soup but pleasingly unrefined in its mix of smokey bacon and razor clams. Both dishes, mercifully, have been plated up in the kitchen, but to serve the order of overcooked vegetables from the side of the table, the waiter again looks as if he's engaged in bomb-disposal work rather than putting food in front of a hungry customer before it cools.

We finish with an Agen prune and armagnac creme brûlée, which is fine, and a soft chocolate savarin with apricot compote and Maury Mas Amiel wine, which is not. Chewy and stale, as though it has been kept in a fridge, the savarin also looks as if it has been lifted out of the dessert section of an in-flight meal.

If you really want to impress American visitors with a bit of upper-crust Victorian history then I suggest you take them to Brown's for tea. It'll cost you a lot less and the butlery fussing should add to the experience rather than diminish it.

The Grill at Brown's Hotel, Albermarle Street, London W1, 020-7493 6020

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Set menu £40; £155 for two with wine

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