Mark Lane, EC3; 020 7444 0004

Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 7pm-2am

5 stars: Don Giovanni, 4 stars: Don King, 3 stars: Don Quixote, 2 stars: Don Johnson, 1 star: Donkey

Budapest. Great city. Unexpectedly great city. I had low expectations of Hungary. What does Hungary conjure up for you? Exactly? Strangely empty, Hungary. But then I just fell in love. It’s my experience that you fall in love with cities within 24 hours, or not at all. You don’t grow to love them, and Budapest just puts out. It has that thing that great cities all have: the harmony of contradictions. Rough and dapper. Elegant and funny. Secret and hospitable. Broad and narrow. Baroque and Stalinist. Fur and nylon. I was there with Tom the snapper: “Ooh, ooh, I know this place. We have to have dinner. Really brilliant. I was doing this Vogue shoot here, and we all went. It was really brilliant. Really cool. Really brilliant food. It’s called, um . . . it’s called Gundel”. Okay, book it, Danno.

Now, there are three immutable rules for a happy, regret-free life. Never make a pass at an oriental girl whose Adam’s apple is bigger than her breasts; don’t put anything in your mouth that involves a bet; and never, ever eat at the suggestion of a photographer. Gundel turned out to be the most expensive restaurant in central Europe, and a place that existed solely to give an authentic taste of Magyar cuisine to Japanese tourists. Actually the food wasn’t bad; I had goulash. Which turns out to be soup, not stew. And it’s also the name for a Hungarian cowboy, although “let’s play goulash and indians” doesn’t have the winning note to it. (Although, pedantically, out here, it would be “let’s play goulash and Ottomans”, which sounds like supper on the sofa.)

What it did have was gypsy violinists. Ah, now I remember what Hungary’s famous for. The most stressful thing in the entire world is to be shut in a room with a questing gypsy violinist. In terms of naked anxiety, it’s way beyond your phone going off during Hamlet’s soliloquy, swimming with jellyfish, or getting dressed up in a Formula One bondage costume in the back of a cab between traffic lights. I watched the great white violinist and the midget accordionist saw their way through the tables of tourists. He circled a hapless Korean couple. They shrank in terror and numb incomprehension as his fat, malevolently bland face, with its slick black pate and golden grin, loomed over them. He winked a terrifyingly dull eye that rolled back in his head and with one fluid movement, too fast to decipher, he was among them with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. It was horrible. Shrieking notes of psychotic dexterity, wringing screaming tremolos and pitiful vibratos from every riff. The air was filled with sentimental death. There is no known defence against an adult male gypsy violinist in an enclosed space: in a Hungarian restaurant, no one can hear you scream.

As quickly as it had begun, it was all over, in a foaming lather of sweat, schmaltz and paprika. The silence hung as mordant and doom-laden as the ear-scything. The Koreans were dead in the water, strudel hanging from their lips. The great predator paused for a moment, regarding them with grim detachment. He was waiting for something — but they didn’t know what. The man’s jowls wobbled. His wife began to sob. “Pay him!” we all mouthed. Money, give him money. But it was too late. The hellish bow was again drawn coldly across the fret. I knew what was coming. No, no, make it stop. Not the Blue Danube! He minced the first stanza, and then with a Paganini-ish dexterity, played pizzicato.

The great bow tapped the Korean breast, and the poor man knew it was a sign. Desperately, he tried to decipher it. Of course. The wallet. Money. He flung the entire contents of his Prada travel purse at the gypsy, his wife hysterically ripping off earrings and a small Rolex. The gypsy pouched his tip, turned, and slowly swam on.

The ham-and-eggs combination of music and food seems to be as old as rhythm and fire, but some people hate it more than the popular sex-and-poetry combo. I must admit that sometimes music in public places is like ethereal chewing gum that sticks mintily to your ear; there’s nothing quite as mournful as the echo of easy-listening classics played in empty restaurants to give them some atmosphere, like lavatory spray covering up the fetid stink of loneliness, failure and tinned bisque.

So it was with all the joie de vivre, appetite and expectation of Tosca confronting a battlement that I approached Bel Canto. One of the rules of eating out in London is never eat in the City, at night. The City is a dreary carvery of steaks, ploughmans and breaded stuff with too much mayonnaise at lunch. In the evening, it’s deader than Chopin’s Sonata No 2 in B flat minor, Opus 35. Bel Canto is stuck in the basement of an office block, up an alley, off a dead end. It would be easier to find the meaning of life. You’re shown into a small lift, wallpapered with a photograph of La Fenice, which gives you the oddly uncomfortable feeling of falling through a great big room, trapped in a very small room. The dining room is possibly the dullest eating space in England. It is an evocation of chemical depression. The walls are painted with broad red and gold stripes, the tables and chairs bring to mind Travelodges of the 1980s. The floor is a percussion instrument of plastic wood veneer. There are framed opera posters, and just to add that touch of terminal despair, random headless mannequins in Cornish pageant fancy dress. In the middle of the room, where there ought to be a chemist, there is a grand piano.

I’m going to get the food out of the way as quickly as possible, because that was the only way to eat it, and I really don’t want to dwell on the liver tart, an offal brick. The artichoke and smoked salmon salad was plainly the result of a shoplifting sprint to an all-night supermarket; the lamb was a soggy brown muscle. Hopefully the monkfish will have kept its vow of celibacy and not produced any more like it. There was something with lavender ice cream on the top, the colour of melted Barbies, that tasted like a pensioner’s knicker drawer. But all this is by the bye. The USP of Bel Canto is that the waiters sing opera. You get Papageno and Papagena loud and close up. But there is a small design fault here. They can’t sing and wait at the same time, so you can’t ask them to get you another glass of wine, or indeed move you to another table while they’re at it. There were only three other occupied tables. Excruciating was too small a word. It was like being trapped in a Jack Vettriano painting.

I was supposed to be eating with this column’s editor. She was late, which almost everywhere else in London wouldn’t have mattered. But these were the 20 sweatiest minutes I’ve spent this century, trying not to make eye contact with Carmen in a pinny. The singers are encouraged to come up and talk to you. It’s like being the cast in a petting zoo. They sing very nicely; they talk like they’re brain-damaged. This is possibly, nay probably — why equivocate? — indubitably the worst concept for a restaurant I’ve ever come across. Bad food with intrusive arias in a basement in the city. In the natural way of things, this restaurant should last about as long as a run of Nixon in China at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. It’s cringingly terrible . . . and yet, and yet. There is something here, a kernel, a shrill note, of something winning, and almost, almost enchanting. You see, what it really needs is 300 customers. If the room were full, preferably with tipsy gay Maria Callas groupies, it would be an entirely different experience, and probably one of the most de rigueur venues in the capital. And you know, I can feel myself coming over all Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, glowing with the spirit of can-do. In these hard times, what we need is singing and soup, and a little magic and make-believe, and if we all wished hard enough, and did our very very best, we could put on a show in the cellar. Help make a bright future happen. Book a table. Pick up the phone, and shout encore! Sing at the top of your lungs for hope. Reach for the stars, but avoid the liver. Yes, yes. We can make dreams come true.

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