Whisky, as I’m sure you know, is a phonetic translation of uisge beatha, the Gaelic for water of life. That’s like calling a prostitute a matrimonial harmony counsellor, or a hammer a thumb massager. It came this close to damn well killing me.

When I drank whisky, lots of other people drank it too. Not as much, or as fast, but they made the effort. Many of them drank gin and brandy and port and sherry and Fernet-Branca. What nobody drank in the entire world were shots of friendly flora, water with just a hint or chocolate martinis. The biggest change in hospitality in the past couple of decades has been the retreat from spirits and fortified wine.

And what has become completely extinct is the sticky trolley — those digestifs and spirituous concoctions that were always a secret recipe known only to three comatose monks or a village of inbred moss-distillers. Drinks go in and out of style, but none has gone so far out as the liqueur. They are the Fair Isle tank tops of the barman’s shelf. Cointreau, Chartreuse (green and yellow), Drambuie — the only people who tipple this now are confectioners. Who was the last lounge lizard or kohl-eyed popsy to order a pousse-cafe — that rainbow of liqueurs gently poured by specific gravity? They’ve all been replaced by Baileys and tinctures flavoured with melon, marula and chocolate — teenage, pre-shag lubricant de-inhibitors.

You’d have thought a whisky bar devoted solely to single malts and mulatto blends would be flying foolishly in the face of fashion, rather like a diner devoted to suet or an Amish lap-dancing club. But to prove that the catering and hospitality industry is more hope and chutzpah than sense and circumspection, one has appeared. And, as if swimming against the tide of alcohol consumption weren’t enough, they’ve gone and put it on the Edgware Road.

Now, if they’d asked me where to dump a whisky bar, I’d probably have suggested somewhere like, ooh, Scotland, perhaps. Siting it in the street with the highest number of Middle Eastern restaurants and shops — and, therefore, Muslims — in central London might have been seen as a bit of a drawback. Just to add a final lead weight to the water wings of commerce, they’ve called it Salt. Does Salt summon thoughts of the peaty warmth of Islay, or the lyrical smoothness of the Spey? Does it evoke the guttural clubbiness of convivial tweedy gents, or the gay, whooping, knickerless abandon of the tartan ceilidh? No. It makes you think of salt mines, sweat and tears, crisps and anchovies — and, for a few of you, the Latin origin of the word salary. That should pack them in.

At 8.30 on a Monday night, who do you imagine I found propping up the bar? Four blokes who, I’d guess, were illegal minicab drivers waiting for the late-night club run. Not so much men of the world as men of anywhere inside the M25. The room’s done up nicely — dark and woody. It’s got the music du jour, that black scat jazz lounge-act stuff sung by really cool, intelligent-sounding Jewish girls.

My whisky days are now behind me, thank God, so I tarried in the bar just long enough to get a frisson of déjà vu disgust at the sour, bellicose breath of the whisky drinker and to collect our guest, my occasional snapper, Matthew Donaldson, who was having a highball at the bar. Whatever happened to highballs? And why were they ever called highballs?

Now, if you had a whisky bar on the Edgware Road that was empty except for four minicab drivers on a Monday evening, what would you put in the upstairs room to squeeze an extra source of income? Reeling lessons? A venue for Glaswegian stand-up comics? How about a very small Italian restaurant? No, me neither. But, given the choices made so far by whoever is running this emporium, it’s par for the course. There is a small, thin dining room, tricked out darkly. The menu is a rootless non sequitur, a senile aside, a Dali-ish juxtaposition. And guess who we found here? A single table containing a couple of Japanese salarymen, nodding animatedly like those velvet birds that dip their beaks into glasses of water infinitely.

We started with a mixed plate of coppa, mozzarella and salami with pickles. The mozzarella was rather good; the rest was ho-hum fine. And then there was the waiter: a game, piccolo geezer who spoke thick Italian English with a thicker cockney accent. As both tongues tend to favour round and imprecise vowel sounds, he made every word of more than one syllable sound like a couple of consonants each side of the exclamation a man might make while having a molar drilled. In the context, it was strangely winning.

There were two other men who lurked, apparently somehow connected to the room, in a Samuel Beckettish sort of way. One of them turned out to be the Is Everything All Right? monitor. “Is everything all right?” he asked twice a course, and each time I broke off my complex but compellingly moving monologue to say a curt yes. But he kept returning. I think perhaps he was having doubts, that the question wasn’t about the food on my plate, but the play of some graver metaphysical imbalance. Perhaps he was questioning the weft of life and the broader spiritual horizons of a man whose existence is measured solely by asking strangers: “Is everything all right?”

My correct answer, of course, should have been: “No, your life is a meaningless, echoing husk of desiccated self-loathing, but the risotto’s lovely.” But that would have been a lie. The caballo nero and treviso risotto wasn’t. It was too wet. And my starter portion was so mountainous that it could have pebble-dashed a lighthouse.

The liver veneziana — I’m on a liver mission at the moment — was tough and too venose. The Blonde’s salt-baked sea bass, which always sounds like John Masefield, is a common enough dish (half the restaurants in London do it), but for the first time ever, the salt had leached into the flesh, making the poor thing taste as if it had been date-raped by a gang of kippers. Although the staff outnumbered the customers, the wait between courses was as inexplicable as it was inexcusable. Starters are about £6, mains about £14.

I asked the waiter why the place was called Salt. “Eeaaoua,” he smiled, and shrugged as if I’d rubbed something or other into an old wound.

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