Restaurant review, Portobello House Hotel Bistro, London.

Ladbroke Grove is a history lesson in brick and concrete. It was the core of the Ladbroke Estate, an explosion of posh properties built in the 1840s after the Hippodrome Racecourse, north of Portobello Road, failed to attract punters and closed down. The classy gardens, squares, villas and crescents of 'Leafy Ladbroke' came to rival the stylish Whig mansions of Holland Park to the south. Unfortunately, on the north side, the demand for house-building for wealthy Victorians dwindled, then stopped, in the 1860s. It was a project which just ran out of money.

The Grove today shows the same split personality. The lower half is Millionaires' Row; the northern half, though hardly Paupers' Alley, runs out of class and style soon after the Westway crossing. What it has instead, in abundance, is shabby chic – the antiques shops, market stalls and chic eateries of Golborne Road (Hi there, Stella McCartney!) and Portobello.

Portobello House is the newest addition to this groovy parish. It's an old Victorian pub, re-made as a two-floor hotel with a bar – not just any old bar but the 'Percy Bar' – and now a "bistro". The press notes rhapsodise about its "original features", "sheer space and modern feel", the "central mahogany-topped bar", the "huge original Murano chandelier", the "graffiti wall" and "cinema screen". You expect to walk into a multi-media cathedral. Imagine my surprise when we walked into… a pub.

The wallpaper is flowery, the decor grey. There are pub tables and chairs on one side of the oval bar. On the other side are the same tables and chairs, but with cutlery. You can tell this is the Bistro because there are fairy lights on the wall and tea lights on the tables. Above two button-back sofas, the "graffiti wall" is a blackboard on which someone has neatly, if inexplicably, chalked Yeats's poem, "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven". On the wall, scenes from Casablanca are played on a loop. I approve of having Ingrid Bergman's lovely smile on a wall, but the main effect is to contrast the liveliness and intrigue of Rick's Bar in Casablanca with the ordinariness of Percy's Bar in Portobello. This looks like an exercise in doing up a boozer on the cheap and giving it fancy names.

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