Restaurant: Bumpkin, London W11

Authenticity can be an overrated ambition, it struck me over lunch at the hideously named Bumpkin. One appreciates the desire of its owner to honour the restaurant's heraldic motto, "For city folk who like a little country living." But when that slice of the bucolic experience revolves around a silage farm aroma on the stairs down to the loo, you begin to wonder if he's taking it a bit too far.

The poignancy about this one is that, for all the condescending ghastliness suggested by the name, there's a nebulous sense that earlier in its young life it might have been all right(ish), but has now decayed. I suppose that's authentically, if anachronistically, rustic, too, echoing postwar country piles gone to seed like the one in Sarah Waters' novel The Little Stranger. Yet where houses such as Hundreds Hall become dilapidated through genteel poverty, the problem for Bumpkin appears to be a mixture of indolence, complacency and greed. The thinking behind it is so transparent, you can picture the speech bubble emerging from the owner's mouth as he had his Eureka moment. "David Cameron's circle… Notting Hill in the week, Oxfordshire at weekends… Catch the zeitgeist… Kerching!!"

Whether the likes of the Tory leader would fall for it, I doubt, because this joint is as ersatz as the aerosol mud idiot urbanites are said to spray on Range Rovers that have inbuilt early-warning systems to turn them back whenever they stray within five miles of the M25.

"I suppose it's sort of trying to recreate staying at your auntie's in Somerset," my friend sniffily observed as he took in the floral paper waging an assonant battle for wall space with the exposed brickwork. "It's not really working, is it?"

Not really, no. We found the room to be dank and gloomy, charmless and soulless, to a degree that even the presence of an outsize pumpkin sat in a nearby armchair couldn't disguise. "It's just naff, isn't it?"

So, too, is the wine list with its cutesy headings ("Upfront and Honest"; "Luscious and Elegant"), and a menu that bangs on about the natural rearing of its grass-fed meat to a nominal target clientele who would rather shoot deer than eat it.

If the intent is to meld engaging rustic relaxedness with rigorous West End cooking, how tantalising seems the margin of error. Bumpkin melds irksome bucolic sloppiness with rigorous West End prices: £2.50 for bread is a chutzpah, and £7 for a measly starter of devilled chicken livers on toast is a wickedly rapacious mark-up. The livers were overcooked, so they'd lost that alluring squidginess, but a decent chilli kick gave them the edge over my friend's equally mean portion of beetroot-cured "organic" (inexpensive, in other words, not wild) salmon. "Undistinguished," was his own euphemism for "cheap and nasty, with a vicious, fishy aftertaste".

Main courses were better. His Buccleuch pork belly with red cabbage was "perfectly nice, although nothing I couldn't do just as well at home". My Charter pie, a mingling of chicken and leeks under a light pastry, was well made, but at an extortionate 13 quid it ought to have come sprinkled with beluga.

The wait for pudding would have been insane even had the room been more than a quarter full, but at least it allowed time for closer study of the menu. "Our FRUIT AND VEG are picked in season," runs one snippet, "when they are at their prime." Rather than everyone else's FRUIT AND VEG, presumably, which are picked six weeks late, when they're withered and unusable. That imbecility put the lid on it, and we told our charming Hispanic waitress that a 25-minute delay for apple crumble, however in their prime these Miss Jean Brodies of the fruit world might be, had delighted us long enough.

"A shocker," said my friend charitably as we passed a couple of bored-looking cooks lolling about in the open-plan kitchen. "Not urban, not country, not sure what it is." Dante's missing tenth circle of hell would seem the obvious answer to that.

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