Restaurant review: DC Diner, Coventry

The gimmick of housing a diner in an old plane rather appealed to our critic… until the food started arriving
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Restaurant review: DC Diner, Coventry
DC Diner, Coventry: 'The last thing this plane did was take part in the filming of Casino Royale.' Photograph: Andrew Fox for the Guardian

In restaurants, themes are not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of good restaurants pretend to be French brasseries, Italian trattorias, Spanish tapas bars or retro American burger joints: nothing wrong with that. The customer immediately understands what they are trying to do, and can calibrate their expectations accordingly.

  1. DC Diner
  2. Coventry Airport West,
  3. Coventry
  4. CV8 3AZ
  5. 024-7688 2604
  1. Open lunch, Weds-Sat, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-9pm; Sun 1-8pm. Meal with drinks and service, lunch from £15, dinner from £30.

Gimmicks are different. A gimmick can all too easily take a restaurateur's eye off the ball. Aureole in Las Vegas, for instance, stores its wine in a four storey-high transparent tower: to fetch your bottle, "wine angels" – young women in skintight catsuits – don a harness, are towed up in the air and descend with your plonk. I know a few people who have been to Aureole and no one has ever mentioned the food. That's the textbook sign of a gimmick – that it's the only thing about a restaurant that you notice or remember.

The gimmick at DC Diner isn't the "diner" part, it's the "DC". The restaurant is in a plane, a McDonnell Douglas DC6 that took its last flight in 2006 and now lives permanently at Coventry airport. (This is at the opposite side of the airport from the free Midland Air Museum.) This plane rolled off the production lines in 1958, and the last thing it did was take part in the filming of Casino Royale; long before that, it belonged to the CIA airline Air America and was involved in covert activities in south-east Asia. If this plane could talk, it would specialise in telling alarming stories in a gravelly, bourbon-and-cigars voice. It probably knows who killed JFK.

Diners have a tradition of being made from adapted and improvised structures – railway carriages and the like – so there's no reason a plane shouldn't work. I like planes but hate flying, so it was a perfect setup for me. It was nice to sit in a plane, but in a comfortable, non-plane seat at a comfortable, non-plane table, and thank the heavens that I wasn't at 30,000ft, gibbering with fear. At least, I wasn't gibbering with fear until the food arrived, and I realised that I was meant to eat it.

Where to begin? Maybe with the chicken and mushroom pie. This looked plausible until we took off the pastry lid and found nothing there. A short, determined search eventually located the filling, which had migrated underneath the soggy chips, presumably during the trip from the kitchen – which is outside, down the steps and along a polytunnel, not far from the loos. (Outside those loos, a marketing slogan proudly boasts about being "Number One In Number Twos". Just the thought you want rattling round your head as you sit down to eat.)

Burgers? Terrible, like the worst burger you ever got a third of the way through at a motorway service station: an ice-hockey puck of overcooked mystery meat. Also sinister were my younger son's chicken nuggets. There is an evolutionary scale of nuggets, ranging from the organically sourced and lovingly made down to specimens that leave you tearful with relief when your children refuse to eat them. These were that second type. The one dish that was sort-of OK was a seafood spaghetti in tomato sauce. It was heavy on the fishsticks and the parmesan (which Italians never eat with seafood), but it was at least edible. The garlic bread with it was also OK. It's hard to screw up ice-cream out of a tub, and they didn't, though Mövenpick is pretty ordinary stuff. Treacle pudding was thick and floury and oversweet. We went at lunch; the evening menu looks similar, but the website says the diner "becomes a more intimate restaurant, oozing elegance and style". The word that stays with me there is "oozing".

With two glasses of wine, two mineral waters and two Cokes, all this came to £38. I was reminded of Elizabeth David's maxim that bad food is always expensive, and it was slow, too – we were in there for more than an hour and a half. Since airline catering is such rubbish, I suppose you could just about argue that it's consistent with the theme idea for the food to be so poor. It's sad, though, to see so much care lavished on the old planes and so little on the customers.

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