Restaurant review, Reform Social and Grill, London.

Did you think that gentleman's-club dining – Brown Windsor soup, game-heavy main courses, "savoury puddings" like Welsh rarebit, a "roast" that's carved, table-side, from a carcass on a silver trolley by a chap who expects a tip – had gone the way of the bowler hat and the maiden aunt? You'd be wrong. While Jeremy King and Chris Corbin are reintroducing the Mitteleuropean grand café concept to London (with the Wolseley, the Delaunay and now Brasserie Zédel) others – from Mike Robinson to Mark Hix – are breathing life into traditional club grub.

The Reform Social and Grill has nothing to do with the club in Pall Mall; it just wants to borrow its elderly glory. Housed in the Mandeville Hotel, in what used to be the DeVigne Bar, it's a dream of gruff male camaraderie, with its button-backed leather sofas, marble-top tables, a huge clock at one end that suggests a station waiting-room and a menu presented in circus handbill typefaces.

I rather like this effortful image-making. I certainly liked the old-fashioned attentiveness of the French cocktail barman who made a fabulous Cîroc vodka martini, while my friend Simon, a slave to fashion, floored an Aperol Spritz, that trendy orange aperitif that tastes of weak Campari and looks like Tizer.

To emphasise the gen-yew-ine Englishness of the place, the menu name-drops a dozen local suppliers, all the names suspiciously Hardy-esque and characterful: Brancaster pea and broadbean soup, Thornby Moor goat's-curd salad, Blythburgh pork chop and something called a Wealdway Ashed Goat Log, which turns out to be an artisanal cheese from Sussex. Even the snails are from Herefordshire. I suppose if they hailed from Orpington, they wouldn't hold half the menu-appeal.

Clubland aficionados will hail old favourites like crab tart, sardines on toast, lamb cutlets and Eccles cakes – but will the horde of foreign visitors who invade Mayfair in the next few weeks? Is Englishness enough of a selling proposition? I ask because, when Simon and I dined there, we dined alone. There wasn't a soul in the place at 8pm on a Tuesday. Solitary dining isn't fun. Dining without any neighbours isn't a lot better. "However sparkling the company or brilliant the food," said Simon severely, "if you're the only people in the place, you could be in Garfunkels." We reflected that, if you're opening a restaurant in the middle of the most alfresco-tastic street in England (James Street), around the corner from the platinum-grade eateries of Marylebone High Street (Roganic, Orrery, Providores), you need to sell your wares more vividly than the owners are doing.

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