Of course I read the other restaurant critics. Some of them have become friends. Recently Adrian (AA) Gill gave his maximum mark of five stars to Olivomare in Belgravia.

He explained that the rare accolade was in part due to the staunch service given by older sibling restaurants, Olivo and Oliveto. There was also a subplot about making future bookings impossibe for an acquaintance of his who loves the place.

Adrian had been to dinner. I rang to book a table for two for lunch last Wednesday and asked for 1.30pm. "Can you do 1.45pm?" I could. As the restaurant name suggests, the menu is piscine. No creature which crawls the Earth figures in a dish. The interior is white on white but for a wall with a pattern of fish.

Adrian mentioned the charm of the pulchritudinous staff. My guest and I are completely ignored. We may as well not be sitting at a table, so the "beauty" of the snooty young things is irrelevant.

When eventually I ask a pretty youth if we can order, he looks at me with open-mouthed astonishment and hurries back from whence he came. After we have managed to make a request and food arrives, the waitress putting it on the table keeps up an animated conversation with a colleague. "Are you talking to me?" I ask.

"No," she says scornfully, as if conversing with a customer would be unthinkable.

Mauro Sanna, owner of the Olivo trio, apparently introduced bottarga (pressed and dried fish roe) to London. In sincere tribute I order spaghetti with bottarga and before that bresaola of tuna with celeriac and sun-dried tomatoes.

The celeriac is properly finely cut - as opposed to grated - and is excellent, but the cured tuna too salty to be enjoyable or even palatable. The pasta is over-cooked with some of the strands glued together, which is a shame.

Tomato and basil salad features under-ripe tomatoes. The best of all the dishes tried is strips of hot, crisp deepfried zucchini. Those, the Sardinian Vermentino Argiolas white wine (£19.75), the Sardinian dessert of sebada (olive-oil fried cheese pastry dribbled with honey) and the lemon cream with candied orange peel are the highlights of the lunch.

Someone I vaguely know comes over and says that because he is a regular he knows that Wednesday is the chef 's day off and therefore I shouldn't be too critical about the food.

So, avoid Wednesdays, I suppose, but in a well-run restaurant it wouldn't make a difference.

•Price above estimates a meal with wine for one.