There are occasional days when New York is a contender for best place in the world. The other week, for instance. The sky was wall-to-wall Virgin Mary butterfly blue. The monolithic skyline stood out like a magic-realist pop-up book. The light was tungsten clear, as bright and farsighted as the Declaration of Independence. And it was all as cold as a hooker’s kiss: it frosted your breath and made your ears burn with a delicious agony. One side of the street was Stygian darkness; the other was lit up like the chorus line at Radio City. It was a brilliant, brilliant day.

I walked through Greenwich Village to the Spotted Pig for brunch. And, as I went, I thought about frostbite. Someone who’s planning to go poleward had just been telling me about the photographs he’d been shown by extreme health and safety as an awful reminder to wrap up warm: pictures of blackened digits and rotten extremities. There was, he said, a hideous penis. Apparently, the poor man forgot to put it away. It blew up like a big black balloon sculpture and had to be kept in a bottle.

I strode along, wondering how on earth it was possible to forget that your willy was on the outside when it was 30 degrees below. What could possibly distract you? A phone call? A polar bear on a unicycle? A particularly exciting edition of the aurora borealis? And then to have some passing explorer say: “Hey, dude, you know Mr Mouse has escaped, and he’s not looking happy?” With unconscious sympathy, I patted my groin, and discovered with horror that my flies were open.

The Spotted Pig is jolly good if you’re passing. I also went to try Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at the London, in a hotel that has been newly renamed the London NYC. New York has been rather sniffy about Ramsay. They don’t take kindly to foreigners who they think have come to impress them. New Yorkers want their incomers to arrive cap in hand, be taxi-drivers, then run 24-hour convenience stores for 30 years before opening small corner restaurants.

Unfortunately, Ramsay’s place isn’t about to prove them wrong. It’s a hideous room that looks expensive without a smidgen of taste. The walls are revolving screens, as if the designer couldn’t make up his mind which colour they should be. (The answer is: neither.) The menu is old-fashioned — not old in a good, nostalgic way, but in an embarrassing, “Oh, my God, did we used to eat that?” way, with overfretted and -fiddled little neurotic lumps of hothouse ingredient done up like toy dogs at Crufts. It leans too heavily on expensive condiments, in the way that plain, rich women wear diamonds and lean on homosexuals. There’s a tedious obsession with truffles, much of which tastes like truffle oil, and the abiding temperature is tiède. That’s pretty much the leitmotif of the place — lukewarm.

The head waiter, a man who had a double first from the school of French oleaginous servitude and hand-wringing, greeted us with a moist, wan smile and enunciated the most annoying and dispiriting sentence in catering: “Have you dined with us before?” He may go on saying it for a decade before he’ll find anyone who says yes. This is not the sort of food that yells: “Hasten ye back!” It’s not the sort of food that eats well in New York. And it’s not as good as any of the kitchens Ramsay oversees in London, England (as the Americans call it). Chefs rarely manage to cook well on two continents simultaneously. They end up franchising their reputations to insecure hotels and resorts, and hope that the money will dull the embarrassment.

Back home, Will Ricker is having the same sort of problem, but on a smaller scale. He’s trying to keep up standards across two London boroughs. Ricker is the jaunty and intimately gregarious Australian who gave us E&O and Eight over Eight, a couple of clever and fashionable pub conversions. Now he has taken the recipe to Belsize Park. What passes for effortless élan and savoir-faire in cosmopolitan Chelsea and Notting Hill looks a bit like incomprehensible surrealism in the foothills of Hampstead, where sophistication is having Alan Yentob on your Sky+ series link and wearing loafers without socks.

The new restaurant, which has been done up almost exactly like the other two (indicating a job lot of starburst trellis, premature corporate branding or a lack of imagination), is called XO, which is pronounced XO and is another fine example of Ricker’s unnerving ability to come up with unbelievably crap names. XO is apparently some sort of condiment or Oriental KY.

The menu is the tried-and-trying formula, eastern gap-year jabberwocky grub: dumplings and sushi, Vietnamese salads and Thai curries. When the kitchen’s on form, it can be moreish. When it’s not, it’s dire. This wasn’t dire. It was far worse than that. Our jaunty waitress recommended the sushi roll of salmon and eel, wrapped in avocado. Now that sounds like a bit of catering-college-exam weirdness. But what came had dumped the salmon and added foie gras instead. Eel-flavoured foie gras in a slimy green coat is the sort of thing you need to be very, very drunk to come up with, and on drugs to eat twice.

Tofu stew in some sort of brown, chunky slime was like savoury earwax-flavoured marshmallows floating in Bovril. And there was a new dish, snow-crab legs. What arrived was apparently the dissected crusty exhaust pipe of a Ford Cortina, up which had been inserted some prawn-flavoured cotton wool soaked in mayonnaise. It was a dish that even an octopus would have turned up its beak at. There was a salad of chicken, coconut milk and Thai basil that the Blonde quite liked. I thought it was disgusting. For pudding, they were offering iced berries with white chocolate sauce. This is a classic from the Ivy. The recipe’s in my cookery book, called The Ivy, which you can get from the Ivy. I’ll send one to Ricker — because this was a sorry approximation.

The room was buzzing with happy Belsize folk (by postcode and silhouette) — people who have been left off life’s guest list, but are making the best of it. If Ricker is planning to roll out a chain of these pub makeovers, he really needs a much, much firmer grip on quality and consistency. A simple example: white tea in XO is £2.50. At Eight over Eight last week, it was £10. I know because the Blonde was so incensed that she made a surly manager take it off her bill.

Ricker is a nice, funny bloke, famous for his tireless, some might say relentless, sense of humour. Well, I like a laugh as much as the next critic. I just mind having to pay for the joke. And, worse, being expected to eat it.

XO

29 Belsize Lane, NW3; 020 7433 0888.

Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm; Sat-Sun, noon-4pm.

Dinner, Mon-Sat 6pm-11pm; Sun, 6pm-10.30pm

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