restaurant review, Brasserie Zédel, London.

It's the sheer scale of the place that strikes you first. The subterranean dining room, reached via a staircase larger than most new restaurants, is on a scale so epic, it could well be visible from space. Tables recede into the middle distance. Far-off fields of velvety banquettes command their own microclimates. Even the menu cards are the size of small tables. Zédel, the new opening from London's fêted restaurateurs Corbin and King, is so generously proportioned, it could comfortably accommodate the clientele of their two existing restaurants, The Wolseley and Delaunay.

The big question is, would they want to go? For Zédel (named, like its predecessors, after a discontinued car marque) is a departure for the lords of the restaurant universe; a mid-market offering pitched squarely at what The Wolseley's celebrity diners would refer to as "civilians".

Expensively carved from what was once part of the Regent Palace Hotel, and more recently the Atlantic Bar, it's a loving recreation of the grand brasseries of Paris, the restaurant equivalent of Woody Allen's dewy-eyed Midnight in Paris. But there's many a slip between La Coupole and Lipp. French brasserie food has fallen into enemy hands in this country, debased into cliché by the likes of Café Rouge. The challenge for Zédel will be whether it can rekindle our excitement for the likes of boeuf bourguignon and confit de canard.

The time-capsule menu is vast; crowded with plats du jours, prix fixes and formules rapides. You could easily visit 20 times and never eat the same thing twice. At first glance the most exciting thing about it is the prices, which are competitive – starters rise from £2.25 for soup, and mains from £7.50 (for steak haché and frites) – remarkably so in a lavishly refurbished ocean liner of a dining room in the heart of the West End.

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