Five stars Foam is where the art is Four stars Foam sweet foam Three stars Foam of the brave Two stars Foaming at the mouth One star Foaming hell

Texture. Texture. And the texture of Texture is, primarily . . . foam.

Foam doesn’t do much for the human palate. It doesn’t have the appealing crunchiness that reminds us of squatting by a wood fire, clad in rabbit fur, gnawing on an elk bone, nor the creamy smoothness we start enjoying about a minute after we’re born. Foam is just foam, with less fortunate associations. It’s what slugs emit when you sprinkle salt on them. It’s what’s left in the sink after you’ve done the washing up. It’s the stuff you get along the shoreline of a sea used as a transnational lavatory. We must be hard-wired by evolutionary biology to regard it with some suspicion. So why does it keep appearing on food in this heavily hyped new restaurant? Expectations have been running high because the chef-director, Agnar Sverrisson, previously worked at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Can he have learnt to love foam from Raymond Blanc?

The interior of Texture is perfectly comfortable, and with so many restaurants nowadays boasting all the warmth of a mortician’s slab, this is a relief. It has subdued lighting, squashy leather chairs and a glass cabinet full of dead twigs, to signal aesthetic aspirations. But that’s okay. They’re quite appealing, as dead twigs go.

No, it’s the food that’s the problem here. First come the posh crisps: deep-fried potato skins sprinkled with seaweed, and a wasabi dip. Now, wasabi can be either genuine (Wasabia japonica) or fake (Armoracia rusticana). Either way, it should be pungent. This bright-green gunk tasted of absolutely nothing, though it looked like something that might have crawled across the floor in an episode of Doctor Who circa 1978, with Tom Baker staring at it, goggle-eyed, while frantically trying to open the door of the Tardis. After the first try, we didn’t bother with the “wasabi” again. Not right, not wrong, just completely pointless: a Liberal Democrat of a dip. We stuck to our posh crisps.

Then came the complimentary appetiser. The principal ingredients were stilton, walnuts and pumpkin: three of the best ingredients around, I’d say, and hard to get wrong. Unless, that is, you dice the pumpkin into little cubes, lightly parboil them, mix with tiny, tiny slivers of stilton and walnut that can hardly be tasted, then cover the mix in a vermilion foam that suggests a slug that has just encountered a particularly venomous pellet. But at least the bread roll was fine – meaning that, when the waiter tried to take it away from me before I’d quite finished, I clung to it with all the ferocity of an alpha-male hyena with its head inside a dead gazelle.

My companion’s starter arrived. She had just been relaying the latest bit of entrancingly filthy gossip from the literary world, so it was a while before we stopped laughing and looked down. The waiter retreated. Our laughter froze. For here was truly a thing of horror, a genuine culinary monstrosity, stringy and mucoid, and once again exuding a sickly foam. A thing created by some unhallowed partnership of HP Lovecraft and HR Giger, working away in demonic tandem in a fetid subterranean laboratory deep beneath Portman Square, grinning evilly to each other in the glaucous light.

You think I exaggerate? Well, only a bit. For this starter, which the menu had suggested was something like a poached egg sprinkled with parmesan, was, in reality, an almost raw egg, splatted onto the plate, the runny yolk staring up through foam the colour of week-old snow, like a huge yellow eye full of malign intent. The foam tasted faintly of parmesan. Raw egg and parmesan foam soup. Served almost cold. My companion asked me if I’d like to try some. “No, no,” I said gallantly. “I couldn’t possibly. It’s all yours. Mmm.”

My starter was a bland but edible little jerusalem artichoke covered in a slightly tangy mayonnaise. But, continually glancing across at the oeuf à la Lovecraft opposite, I was beginning to worry about what I was getting next. I’d ordered charolais cheek of beef, and already I was picturing to myself the arrival of some horrific, exploded mess of crimson tubes and flaps, like John Hurt's stomach by the end of Alien. With Lovecraft working in the kitchens, anything was possible.

First, though, I got a cup of tea, to “cleanse the palate”, though it didn’t come in anything so conventional as a cup. Given my worries about subterranean laboratories, I was disconcerted to see that the tea really did arrive in a test tube. A clear plastic test tube, in a plastic test-tube rack. Nor was this any light, delicate, translucent tisane. Nominally an apple and thyme tea, it was entirely opaque, a gritty sludge with little apple or thyme, but more than a hint of salt, only deepening my suspicion that it had been made with water extracted straight from the Thames estuary at Tilbury that morning.

My poor companion’s luck wasn’t improving, either. Her main course was smoked tuna. The aroma was pleasant, and it looked artfully seared round the edges, sushi-raw inside. But on tasting it – I tried some too – we both agreed that it must have been smoked by having an elderly Frenchman called Gaston, with three-day stubble and a 60-aday Gauloise habit, breathe on it heavily just before it came to the table. It’s possible it was tea-smoked with earl grey. But, in effect, it was as if it had been tobacco-smoked over a heap of fag butts trawled from a gutter in Montparnasse.

As for my cheek of beef, after I’d asked the waiter to take away my Tilbury tea, it was fine. In fact, it was rather good. Texture evinces the antipathy towards antioxidants common in top-end restaurants these days, so the only vegetables were two green seedling sprigs and some grated carrot. But the beef was dense and shiny with melted glaze, and better than any tender but dull old fillet could ever be.

Given the failure of the other courses, however, we stopped there. The menu did offer a tempting rice pudding, but with “white chocolate snow” on top, and we were fearful of more foam. The wine was a 2005 Viognier, Yalumba, Eden Valley, and was full of at least three kinds of fruit. Excellent. And so it should be, at £34.50 for a half-bottle. Retail, a bottle is about a tenner, so that’s a 700% mark-up.

My lunch companion and I go some way back, and I’m optimistic that she may yet forgive me. But if you brought someone here whom you were trying to impress/schmooze/seduce/clinch a vital deal with – or wring a legacy out of – you would be truly and deeply embarrassed. There wasn’t just one error or oddity, but a bafflingly bland and unpleasant succession of them. The service, rather heartbreakingly, was uniformly sweet and attentive, and we soon started feeling sorry for them, bringing dish after dish to our table, and each time seeing our woebegone faces begone with yet more woe. But we couldn’t help it, staring glumly down, thinking only “What fresh hell is this?”, as Dorothy Parker used to every time the phone rang.

AA Gill is away

34 Portman Square, W1; 020 7224 0028 Tue-Sat: lunch, noon-2.30pm; dinner, 7pm-11pm

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