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5 stars: The life aquatic; 4 stars: Go with the flow; 3 stars: Sink or swim; 2 stars: In deep water; 1 star: Not waving but drowning

If you’re George Monbiot, you’ll already know this. Actually, if you’re George Monbiot, you won’t be reading this, you’ll be lounging in your Juicy Couture tracksuit, sucking a Starbucks and surfing the net for more fearful misery to get his hooks into. The rest of you will just have to make an ill-informed guess. Your starter for 10: since the beginning of the industrial revolution, how much water has mankind irreplaceably used up? Is it one gallon per head, 100 gallons per head or 1,000 gallons per head? And how much of that figure do you think is due to bottled water? The answer is, of course, none. All the water that ever was, every ice-age glacier, every princess’s tear, every rill, gill, brook, beck and burn, each and every drop of monsoon, all scattered showers, every old man’s prostate dribble and teenager’s salivay snog is still here. The world is as soggy as the Garden of Eden.

Water is not a finite resource; it isn’t a vanishing commodity; if you leave the tap running, it doesn’t vanish for ever. Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re wasting it: you can’t. You may be wasting the energy that brought it to you, but you’re not clever enough or powerful enough to vanish. Water is constantly on the move. It flies in the night in the howling storm, burrows through the minutest crease in the impregnable rock, rests behind the skirting board, meditates brightly on dawn spiders’ webs. The cupidity and caprice of water is one of the central themes of mankind’s saga. We have to go with the flow.

There’s an awful lot being said about water in restaurants at the moment. Green, publicity-aware restaurateurs and chefs are proclaiming their welcome for customers who demand tap water. In New York, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor, has called for a boycott of bottled water. My counterpart on The Times, Giles Coren, rates restaurants on how ethically pure their water is. The most evil thing you can be caught holding is a cold bottle of Fiji water. Actually, Fiji is exceptionally good: very soft, very round. Giles and all the other water divines don’t mind extolling wine that’s flown over from Chile or Australia or California or Cape Town. It makes no difference to the atmosphere what’s in the bottle. It’s the trip that murders the polar bears. But there is an assumption that says wine or tequila or rum or Mexican chilli sauce is worth the flight. But water is, well, just water.

I drink little but water, and I can tell you, it varies greatly. Fiji has as much right to exploit a renewable natural resource for the good of its inhabitants as the French have to export their wine, which, when all’s said and done, is mostly water anyway. I always drink tap water in New York, because New York has very good tap water. I never drink it in London, because the water here is hard, limey and tastes like it’s been used to rinse false teeth. You’re mad if you drink bottled water in the Highlands, but you’re equally mad if you drink tap water in Paris.

Water has become the toast of self-righteousness. This is stupid, lazy, T-shirt-slogan morality. Bottled water is ethically, intellectually and environmentally indistinguishable from bottled anything else. There is a real world problem with water: it’s the indiscriminate drilling of wells in the Punjab, the salination of central Asia, the contamination of the water table under the Middle East, the cholera and dysentery in sub-Saharan Africa, the evaporation of Lake Chad, the drought in central-southern Australia and the fact that 1.1 billion people can’t get a clean, clear drink. So do you imagine the sort of ethically filtered aqua you sip matters a drip to a woman who has to walk four miles to fill a bucket with brown amoebic sludge? And if anybody writes in to tell me that I should realise everything’s related, I will pay the school bully to push their head down the bog.

Which brings me, in a bad-tempered sort of way, to Waterhouse, which I approached with a certain grim scepticism, not least because it’s on the dark side of Hoxton. Trying to find anything up there is a misery of light-industrial grot and video artists who lie in the gutter like run-over badgers. Waterhouse is the sister of some ethically blameless, smiley, shiny, happy place in King’s Cross. This one sits next to a dead canal, on a weepingly depressing street, beaming gormlessly like a good deed in a bad world. The night we were there, there were a pair of single men eating alone. Neither of them was reading. A chap eating with a book looks cosy and self-contained. A chap eating without a book is a lawyer.

The Blonde said the décor was right up her organic cul-de-sac. It’s from the currently fashionable spartan, homemade, shucks, let’s-build-a-restaurant-in-the-barn school of design. It’s decorated with shelves of synchronised home-bottled water, all filtered by the management. The kitchen is open and apparently uninhabited. The atmosphere has all the élan of Club Class on an overnight flight to Toronto.

I started with a duck risotto, a mountain of sloppy rice, full of fatty, meaty bits, as if Jemima Puddle-Duck had flown through a wind farm. It was very badly made: the rice hadn’t absorbed or emulsified whatever emetic soup it had been cooked in. It was just sloppy, ducky and overpowering, like old Chinese takeaway. The point of risotto is the rice. Rice is the main ingredient. Rice is the joy and the pleasure; rice from the dank, damp Po is the star; everything else is an accompaniment. The Blonde had a bit of recycled fish, which was probably blameless, but about as exciting as waiting for a dial-up internet connection. I can’t remember anything else about any of it – except the service, which stretched on inexorably, like the Mongolian steppe. I felt as if I’d sat down to three separate meals, two of which I lost in the mists of time.

As we finished, a large and confident sloaney-looking lad sauntered up to the table. I immediately knew two things: he was about to show me his concept, and it was about to be the biggest mistake he’d ever made. I caught his eye and tried to form a Vulcan mind meld. Stop right there, son of Adam. Keep your hands where I can see them, and step away from the food critic. Whatever you do, don’t engage the reviewer in knowing, just-between-you-and-me, off-the-record banter. Really, if the first rule is don’t poison the customers, the second rule is don’t approach the critic.

“I just thought I’d take this opportunity to explain a little of what we’re trying to do here.” Dead man talking. It’s the Green Mile, and there was no stopping him. Like Tennyson’s brook, he babbled eternally: zero carbon footprints, no big fridge, heat exchanges in the canal, local council collective initiatives, lights that make the room darker when you switch them on. Removable, reusable, refundable, regurgitated, renal. And the food? I asked tentatively. Only as a speed hump.

“What?” he said, as if interrupted while reciting an epic ode. “What?” The food, the cooking. “Oh, yes. We try to keep it sort of local, wherever possible.” It plainly isn’t the point of this place. This is a teddy bears’ picnic on behalf of endangered teddy bears everywhere. What it really serves is right-on burgers and smug smoothies. Why do you bother, I ask. “Well, it was just the way I was brought up,” he said, smiling from a great height. “I really care.” I could have said, look, if you really, really care about the environment and the teddy bears and stuff, don’t open a restaurant, just scratch a living from hedgerows and fart into paper bags. A green restaurant is a contradiction in terms. Eating out is conspicuous consumption, it encourages all sorts of unnecessary emissions, and fun. If you really care about the environment, you eat raw stuff in the dark in a tent.

“He was a nice chap,” the Blonde said as we left. Yes, wasn’t he? Rather went with the room. “I’m glad somebody’s doing this,” she added. Yes, and aren’t you glad they’re doing it in Hoxton?

Oh, and by the way, the water. The water was unsurprisingly unpleasant. Tinny and bitter, as if someone had dissolved an aspirin or an unpleasant truth in it.

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