When a restaurant advertises itself as elegant French, your mind makes immediate associations, among them stiffly starched table linen, perfectly crafted food in tiny portions on large white plates, and smartly attired, knowledgeable service staff who were specially selected for their sixth sense and trained to within an inch of their lives.

You get the table linen at Cassis, but everything else has been left to gather dust in someone’s ‘to do’ tray. To start, our reservation was lost and after much flipping of pages, it was found in the previous day’s bookings. The main dining room – sparsely decorated with black and white curlicues – was lit with fluorescent light. A wire dangled exposed from the ceiling, and almost every single table was balanced on a thick (ie, visible) wad of paper jammed under the base. Classy, n’est-ce pas? Inexplicably, the staff began fiddling with the light levels so, for a few minutes, the room was alternately plunged into dark, then searing brightness, then dark, then dim, then bright… The bowl of home-made butter arrived at the table straight from the fridge in a cold, hard block that required hacking with the knife. One particularly hirsute male waiter wore short sleeves and it was all we could do not to flinch every time his hairy arm extended across the table to deliver or collect dishes. Worse, no single waiter was assigned to our table, so no one ever really knew what had already been ordered. After the third ‘Would you like to order a drink?’, it all started to wear a bit thin. Especially when we later discovered the bottle of San Pellegrino cost $9 before taxes. Meanwhile, the menu was littered with spelling mistakes and a glaring absence of accent marks. We asked what the notation ‘(c)’ that appeared next to several dishes meant. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. No one really knows. We’ve asked the chef. It’s probably a typing mistake.’

Food-wise, save for the excellent duck liver terrine – a smooth, fragrant and very generous cut – the dishes, while technically correct, were generally either incredibly dull or needed a heavier hand with the seasonings. The mushroom stew was marked by a generous heap of fungi in a pool of anaemic, yellowish, tasteless soup. At a second dinner, what might have been a delicately flavoured asparagus soup was completely overwhelmed by the salty, hard lump of shredded smoked salmon, optimistically described on the menu as ‘a fantasy’. (Note: it wasn’t.)

We asked what the ‘unilaterally cooked’ sea bass involved. ‘Oh, that means it’s half-cooked on the skin side only,’ surely the world’s most unappetising description of what turned out to be a fairly nice, if unexciting, $42 filet. The simmered pork chop and feet sounded intriguing, but as it turned out, Porky’s hoofs had been incorporated into the thick reduction; and no one could work out whether the accompanying mash, overpowered by raw chives, was meant to be that lumpy.

I get the idea of fine dining. I expect small portions and I expect to pay a lot. But, in return, I expect quality in both the technique and produce. The biggest shock of both dinners came with the arrival of the home-made linguine, a portion so small (and utterly bland) that it lasted four mouthfuls – and that was eating it delicately. Worse, the four smallish tiger prawns were so over-tenderised they could have been cleanly snapped in two. At $35 before taxes, this wasn’t fine dining – this was a shameful rip-off. The desserts were a little better. The papaya soufflé was perfect, as was the oversized macaron sandwiching light, fresh strawberry sorbet. But the ‘molten’ Valrhona fondant cut open to reveal a literally dry, empty hollow; while the frozen calvados parfait was essentially a round Magnum sitting in a pedestrian pool of Granny Smith apple purée.

As if that weren’t enough, we suddenly found ourselves completely abandoned by the service staff after dessert had been served. (This after we’d been continuously interrupted during the meal.) I had to physically get up from the table to tap on the window to attract someone’s attention. As one fellow diner muttered on the way out, ‘There are too many other restaurants in this town.’

Further information about Cassis.