Devonshire Square, EC2; 020 7256 3233

Mon-Fri, 7am-midnight

5 stars: The Square Mile, 4 stars: Fair and square, 3 stars: Square dance, 2 stars: Square-bashing, 1 star: Back to square one

I went for lunch in the City the other day, and on the way home found myself staring at an advert on the back of a bus. What caught my eye wasn’t so much the words — which were promoting some insurance company — as the picture next to them. Instead of a car or a house or any of the other things most normal people might want to insure, there was a photo of a chicken wearing a telephonist’s headset.

Naturally, I found myself wondering what it meant. Was it a clever psychological trick, designed to make people call for a quote: “There’s a great deal waiting for you, if you’re not too chicken to pick up the phone”? Was it a dreadful misunderstanding on the part of the graphic designer: “Yeah, it’s nearly there, mate, but I think what it really needs is a picture of a fit bird on the phone”? Or did it betray a darker and more shameful truth — that the company’s call centre is staffed by illegal avians?

Anyway. Lunch. Devonshire Terrace is part of a new development near Liverpool Street. There was a bit of a buzz before the opening, because, while things are better than they used to be, there’s still a paucity of decent places to eat in the Square Mile. It occupies a big site in the corner of a giant glass-roofed courtyard, framed by the brick walls of former warehouses. As the name indicates, there’s a terrace — a large decked area in the atrium that lets you do inside-out alfresco — as well as a restaurant, bar and private rooms. It’s open from breakfast to midnight and, according to the blurb, wants to bring New York flexibility to City dining. You want breakfast outside? No problem. You want the steak your way? You gaht it.

The interior is done out in modernist Euro chic: clean-lined dark-wood booths and banquettes highlighted in red, with a white marble bar at one end and a view through to the kitchen at the other. Along one wall, sliding Japanese screens divide off the four private dining rooms, and there’s a long balcony out the back for smokers. It’s undeniably comfortable and smart, though without being particularly original or interesting.

I took my friend Special K. She turned up in her trainers, a strangely prescient move given that the boards of the terrace had shrunk and there was a sign warning heel-wearers to mind the gaps. I was expecting the other customers to be wheelers and dealers, juggling millions between mouthfuls, but most seemed simply to be out for a nice lunch. Dotted among the suits were a couple of girls in uniform who looked like they worked in a bank, a bearded David Brent-alike in a lemon-yellow shirt, and a fortysomething woman in a lurid pink headband who, as Special K pointed out, had apparently been taking her cues on appropriate business attire from Lucinda on The Apprentice.

We asked for a table on the terrace — a mixed pleasure, as it turned out. They were still working on the building next door and our conversation was punctuated by the grinding of masonry drills. Under the glass roof, the temperature veered between polytunnel warmth and wind-tunnel chill, depending on the scudding vagaries of the sky. As we were sitting outside, the waitress asked for a credit card upfront. Clearly, City types are apt to do runners.

Devonshire Terrace is the work of Alex Langlands Pearse and Simon Prideaux, the team behind the Chelsea gastropub Admiral Codrington and Vingt-Quatre, a 24-hour sleb-and-sloane dining room on Fulham Road. For the City venue, they’ve brought in the former chef of Cheyne Walk Brasserie. They clearly know who they’re catering to. The menu is a compilation of easy-eating brasserie favourites: first courses of carpaccio, asparagus and foie gras with brioche; caesar, duck and goat’s cheese salads; a couple of classy pastas and club sandwiches; lots of grilled meat and fish. The wine list stretches from £4-a-glass house to £3,333-a-bottle vintage Krug.

We started with a yellowfin tuna tartare and a Cornish crab, mango and avocado salad, which came dolled up as cheffy little mounds. The crab was a pretty faultless summer dish: sweet flesh and fruit, finished with chervil, chives and a mini-moat of tomato coulis. The tuna came with the textural surprise of whispy fried shallot, though it was spoilt by too heavy a hand with the salt.

With the main courses, the idea is that you order your fish or meat unadorned — pan-fried halibut, say, or grilled tiger prawns or chateaubriand — then choose one of 10 different sauces to go with it. Special K went for roast seabass fillets with chilli and lime, not a bad combination, though the sauce was disappointingly one-dimensional. I had a veal chop, which is one of my favourite things in the whole world. This was a fine bit of limousin meat, cooked to a perfect soft pinkness.

Again, what let it down was the sauce. On the face of it, allowing customers to play pick and mix with the accompaniments makes sense: they get to eat what they want, rather than having the bloke in the kitchen decide for them. But it also leaves a lot of room for error — and, let’s face it, is less New York chic, more Midwest meat shack. What would you have had with a veal chop? Béarnaise? Grain-mustard jus? Muscat and stinking bishop? Fish velouté with brown shrimps? I decided to play sauce roulette and take a recommendation from the waitress. “The tomato and shallot salsa is nice,” she said. “Okay, I’ll have that.” It wasn’t a brilliant choice — too shy and watery for the meat — though I suppose I should be grateful she didn’t suggest the fish velouté.

There was one thing, though, for which only the kitchen can take responsibility. Purple mash. Who on earth thought mash made from purple potatoes was a good idea? I ordered it, just to see if it lived up to its ghastly promise. It arrived like a bowl of blueberry sorbet in a futurist joke shop, the violent violet sticking out like a severely bruised thumb.

Puddings were a raspberry and vanilla cream and a lemon posset with brandy snaps, both nicely made, but extravagantly overgarnished, as if a camp Victorian milliner had been let loose on them. To get to the lemon, I had to fight my way through strawberries, blackberries, mint and two kinds of shredded citrus peel.

None of it was bad food (nor was it wildly expensive: our three courses, with water, herbal teas, service and a glass of wine came to about £85). It just wasn’t terribly exciting. Brasserie menus need to have an element of comforting familiarity — it’s what places like the Wolseley or Le Café Anglais do so well; it’s the thing that makes you want to order everything on the list. But while Devonshire Terrace tries hard to please, it ends up being a bit ho-hum, a bit seen-it-all-before.

The staff were smiley, attentive and enthusiastic. One thing was puzzling me, though. The restaurant’s logo is a simple blue line drawing of an elephant’s head with white tusks. What’s that all about, I asked a waiter. “We sponsor an elephant in South Africa,” he said. “It has no mother.” So the restaurant’s image is based on an orphaned pachyderm? “Yes,” he said, as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world.

I should introduce him to the telephonic chicken.

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