10 Motcomb Street, SW1; 020 7730 6074 Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-9.30pm

5 Stars: Peter Pan, 4 Stars: Panglass, 3 Stars: Pan's People, 2 Stars: Pan pipes, 1 Star: Down the pan

Just after seven, as the dawn chorus turns into the morning oratorio, at that moment when most humans are hoarding the last blissful 45 minutes with Morpheus in that sleepy, syrupy, dream-clotted, burrowing, thick-limbed plaiting of pre-consciousness, the door bell cleaved the morn like a Stuka with a grudge. When you share accommodation with a brace of sleeping infants, a jack russell and a blonde, a shrill early morning clarion is not what you want to wake up to. Hastily pulling on the Blonde’s rather fetching kimono negligee affair, I hurtled downstairs, de-Chubbed myself and the door, cracked it open and, blinking through furious piss-hole eyes, stooped to pick up the papers while trying to prevent the kimono from sundering to the sternum. A cheery voice said, “Hello. I’m the BBC Radio van. Sorry to be early.”

What? You’re the BBC what? It was surreally like meeting Thomas the Tank Engine.

“The Today programme. I’ve got the radio car.”

Oh, my giddy auntie, it’s finally happened. Random public access — they’re sending out radio cars willy-nilly. Like Gordon Brown phoning strangers in the middle of the night, the BBC has finally become the secular version of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Instead of “We’d like to tell you about God”, it’s, “We’d like you to tell us about God. Thought for the day begins in three minutes.”

Why are you here? I whimpered. I paid the licence fee. “You’re on in half an hour.” What am I talking about?

“I don’t know. I’m just the radio car.”

Actually, it doesn’t matter. I have thought for some time that there are just half a dozen smug contrarians who do all the BBC’s opinions — “Okay, mate, you’re down for house prices in the Midlands, knife crime and a jokey bit about teaching Latin to pets.”

I considered sitting in the stuffy little cab that smells of morning breath and fear and looks like Doctor Who’s lavatory, on a chair that once held Nicholas Soames, waiting for the swarms of gastric moths to eat holes in my empty stomach, before having John Humphrys puncture my ear with, “So, Mr Gill — A A Gill — why should we listen to your opinion anyway?” And I thought of the warm Blonde upstairs and the truffling twins and the curled jack russell, and I said, “Piss off. Tell Humphrys he’s a bag of pantomime ire. Tell Jim Naughtie if I see him hanging round the misery-lit section of Hatchards again, I’ll make him eat my words. And that Sarah Montague — you can give her a great big kiss.”

I still have no idea why they sent the radio car. Opportunistic opinion-mongering. By coincidence I was interviewed by Sarah Montague the other week. The wireless gives you Day-Glo mental pictures of what people look like, and Sarah’s voice, as I’m sure you know, sounds like an attractive, smart, empathetic, mousey 40-year-old. Boy, are those vocal cords underselling the package. Think Angelina meets Jessica Rabbit by way of a Dolly Parton jelly mould — a mass of peroxide curves and carmine pout. Think of that as you lie in bed on Monday morning listening to her breathe gloom first thing.

She said: “Why do you never answer a question?” Don’t I?

“You only answer half the question.” Well, you only ask ones that are half-interesting.

“I did ask someone in the audience what they wanted to know about you and they said, ‘What makes him such an annoying prat?’ ” And I replied, with my smuggest smirk, steepling my fingers and donnishly closing my eyes, that if I told them, then they'd all be one. As it was, I could annoy them with pratitudes, but they didn’t annoy me at all. Not remotely. In fact, I live in a remarkably annoyance-free world. If some wrinkle in the silken counterpane of life turns up, like the BBC radio car, I simply pass it on to you. So tell me — who’s the prat? Me for writing it, or you for reading it?

Of course, I didn’t actually say that, I thought it up on the way home. I made some defensive and pompous truism about the lonely nature of criticism and the selflessness of writing. But then, that’s the joy of a column as opposed to the wireless — for as we speak, I have also just crawled into bed with Miss Montague and I’m about to make her Sunday. The downside is, I’m also probably sharing the sofa with John Humphrys.

Pantechnicon is an interesting word — its OED meaning, with initial cap, is a shop on Motcomb Street that sold curiosities in the 19th century. It comes from the Greek pan, meaning all, and tekhnikon, pertaining to the arts. There was an earlier panopticon, which was Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison where every inmate could be seen from a central point but not know they were being watched. By inventing invisible omniscience, he gave interior designers that which had previously been the perk of God.

The Pantechnicon on Motcomb Street has been reinvented as the Pantechnicon Rooms, a bar and restaurant by the team who started the Thomas Cubitt on Elizabeth Street — named after the Regency architect and town planner who built Belgravia. The first thing we can surmise about these restaurateurs is that they’re too clever by half and probably like to play Trivial Pursuit after sex.

The Pantechnicon Rooms looks beautiful. It’s a smartly conceived and coolly grown-up upstairs-downstairs, exactly right for this mimsy corner of London envy, where the shopping bags are large and sturdy enough to count as single men’s shanties in India. Upstairs, the restaurant menu tries too hard. It’s a confusion of too much and not enough. There are five versions of smoked fish, which, unless you’re a Jewish deli, are repetitive. The beetroot-infused smoked salmon looked like biker’s road rash and tasted of freshly turned earth. I had a tomato consommé with langoustine tails — very modish. The pale tomato jus needs to be as intense as an exorcism and this was tomato-ish, tomato-like. The langoustine had been infuriatingly left with bits of carapace, so they had to be fiddled with — and they hadn’t been cleaned. Look, if I want to eat crustacean crap, I’ll order it. Jokey fish fingers were too literal, tasting nastily like fingers that had been made out of fish.

My main course was a belly of pork, a chic scratching, again achingly fashionable — fine except that the apple slice and the chopped salad it came with couldn’t commit to being either garnish or an accompaniment, like a fey date that might but ultimately doesn’t. A very 1970s duck breast tasted like the 1970s. This french magret, so popular in nouvelle old days, reminded me of bloody tough dinners past. It was overtaken by confit — the other extreme, and equally annoying. One day, someone who isn’t Chinese is going to do something really nice with a duck. Pudding was again equivocal — part sybaritic, part millinery.

This restaurant can’t decide how raised-pinkie poncey it wants to be. It’s blazer-and-jeans food, hedging its appearances. At £185 for four, including one glass of wine, it is expensive for the expertise of this kitchen. It is promising the look and the atmosphere, but promising slightly more than it can deliver. As a pantechnicon, it’s not pan and its technique is dodgy. This is a criticism I could have made into a rubber stamp this year. However, it may not worry the locals — a fickle, moneyed, rootless lot. But this isn’t a good climate in which to be opening dining rooms that rely on doing smart, clever little things with commonplace ingredients.

The service was tawdry. The Blonde and I arrived 20 minutes ahead of Johnny and Sarah Standing — it’s a thoughtlessly common catering practice to leave an incomplete table hanging unattended until all the orders can be made at once. I understand that this suits the kitchen and the serving staff, but restaurants shouldn’t be run for the convenience of cooks and waiters.

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