Restaurant review: Dstrkt, London W1

Down the dark stairwells of Dstrkt, there is good food, but the dining room is full of people who don't want to eat
Irritable vowels: Dstrkt, the underground restaurant. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos for the Observer Antonio Zazueta Olmos/Observer

9 Rupert Street, London W1 (020 7317 9120). Meal for two, including wine and service, £140

At the bottom of a deep, dark hole just off Leicester Square, there is a kitchen filled with chefs who are cooking their socks off. I can't for the life of me work out what they are doing there. The open kitchen is in the very arse end of the public bit of a nightclub called Dstrkt – the lack of vowels tells you lots of what you need to know. I would now make jokes about this all being total bllcks, but the blogger who drew the place to my attention,, has already grabbed all of those. I have my pride. Personally I like vowels. They do rather round things out. Then again this is a joint of hard edges and black walls, so perhaps it suits.

It is a collaboration between the people behind the London clubs Mahiki and Whisky Mist, the founders of the Buddha Bar chain and a shed load of Bulgarian money. They claim to have spent £25m. As the closure of the hateful London Buddha Bar was one of those moments I marked with bunting and a brass band, it's fair to say it's not my kind of hangout. Go down the dark, shadowed stairwells and you emerge into a multi-levelled black-clad dining room full of thick glass tables, one of which I smashed my thigh against in the gloom. Ask nicely and I'll show you the bruise. To one side, behind huge black drapes is the nightclub with a dance floor that rises and falls by 4ft, to be ridden by a troupe of club dancers, because the sort of stupidly wealthy people who come here need someone else to do the dancing for them. In the VIP area the tables cost £1,500. Do you get anything with that? "Yes of course, sir," the waiter said. "A magnum of vodka." Anything to dull the pain.

Then there is the chef, George Yaneff, previously at José Andrés's restaurant Bazaar, in the SLS Hotel in Los Angeles. I ate there once and though the room looked like it had been decorated by a 13-year-old, the food was very good: a little modernist trickery from the Ferran Adrià playbook, with whom Andrés trained, but for the most part it was just well-executed tapas. It's the same here. There is a little bit of silliness at the beginning in the shape of a duck-liver lollipop with a sour-cherry jelly which isn't sour enough and popping candy which adds nothing. The crumb on deep-fried olives stuffed with spiced pork is a little too refined.

After that, everything picks up. Scallops with a smooth pea purée are expertly seasoned and cooked and come, praise be, with their coral intact. Big prawns are beautifully grilled and seasoned with a charred spring-onion oil and offer lots of head-suckage opportunities. There is a Kilner jar of hot smoked caramelised and crunchy cauliflower florets which gives a puff of smoke as you lift the lid. It's completely compelling. Two grilled lamb chops with a smoked aubergine purée were both of terrific quality and as well executed as you could hope to find. Most impressive of all is a dark and chewy risotto negro, filled with more big prawns, baby squid and cockles, which is the sort of dish I might just tolerate the tooth-grinding stupidities of the place for.There was the hit of long-reduced quality fish stock and the intensity of the squid ink and the crunch of the rice. No one would call this place cheap. Those two lamb chops are a tenner, for example. But £12 for the paella felt strangely reasonable in a club where absolutely nothing is.

There were missteps, not least the vast over-reduction of meat sauces with some otherwise good rabbit ravioli or with hunks of slow-cooked baby goat. You could have varnished tables with it. Desserts were creamy things in more Kilner jars. The point is that the kitchen is full of people who can cook. Sadly, the dining room is full of people who don't want to eat. Half of them are women who look like they don't "do" food; the other half are the sort of men who'd regard it as a good night out if you sprayed cream into their mouths from a can. It's all seriously bloody odd and, being honest, I can't imagine it being like this for long. At the very least somebody needs to set those poor cooks free.

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