Poles are valued in London for many things, not only working so well for such modest pay. But for their cuisine? Not so much.

The Knaypa in Ravenscourt Park, which opened at the end of last year, optimistically calls itself "probably the best Polish restaurant in London". It hopes to make Polish food seem modern and stylish - about as good a plan as fitting little wings to a steamroller and hoping it will fly.

Polish food has its place, no doubt - in Poland, or for homesick Poles abroad. Such stodge might even be welcome for people of any ilk needing urgently to take on heavy ballast: people, say, who are feeling the cold, severely famished, a bit drunk, or any combination of the three. But haute cuisine, it's never going to be.

The food at The Knaypa seems authentic enough, and it's certainly fairly priced. Seedy brown bread comes with a little tub of fatty pork rillettes, instead of butter. Slices of soused herrings (£4.65) were very tender and tasty, though they weren't really enhanced by three separate mounds of sauce: tomato, horseradish, and an apple-and-onion mayonnaise.

Soured rye-flour soup "with white sausage, ceps and quail eggs served in a bowl of bread" (£5.45) was not quite as described. "White sausage" turned out to be slices of a springy, bright pink garlic sausage; the eggs, sliced and randomly lurking, were hen's; the ceps were undetectable; and the bowl was a bowl. But the soup had an extraordinary tart, tangy taste, new to me, being based on kwass, a liquid made by fermenting sour rye flour in water for several days. It's quite appetising and it's easy to imagine that if you had been brought up on this gruel, you would miss it.

Home-made dumplings (pierogi) filled with veal served with confit onion and smoked bacon (£8.40) looked almost like a plate of stuffed pasta, rather than dumplings as we know and fear them, being moderately sized half-circles stuffed with quite a delicate meaty mix. But they were still a lot denser than good pasta.

Bigos (sauerkraut stew) is a formidable casserole (£8.75), made with pickled cabbage, tomato and several kinds of meat in small chunks (mainly pork) stewed together, again with that slightly sour, fermented taste, and spicing that included caraway. It came with a dollop of potato mash and, although portions here are not huge by the standards of some Polish restaurants, it was still crazily filling.

In Poland, they say: "Eat, drink and loosen your belt!" Here, the feeling of getting up from the table feeling a good two notches bigger round the waist is generally less sought after. We didn't try the Traditional Polish Baked Cheesecake.

No water, tap or bottled, was proposed to us by our waiter, being perhaps a drink little esteemed in these quarters.

Sebastian wore a "manager" badge, and, on the back of his red shirt, Knaypa's logo, a foaming beer tankard. We should, of course, have had vodka (shots of Wyborowa, Sobieski, Smirnoff, Absolut and Zubrowka, all just £1.90) but feebly chose glasses of wine from the short list, a disappointing Gavi di Gavi and a better Chianti Classico. They didn't quite cut through the food.