A pleasant wander through Australia and a new restaurant with issues: Our Friday night out at the Royal Academy

Restaurant Review:  The Keeper's House (London)Art Exhibit:  Australia (The Royal Academy)

The Royal Academy has taken the unprecedented step (at least in my memory) of doing a retrospective show on the art of an entire country.  Given the number of Australians in London, they must have known there was a built-in audience.  I'd guess 75% of the viewers were from Down Under.  Including our friend Guy, who suggested the outing.

For an old traditionalist like me, it's a show of two halves.  The first is both interesting and lovely, and

there's a good story to tell.  Europeans coming to a strange land.  Overcome by its grandeur, but too bound by their European traditions of green fields and blue skies to really paint what they saw.  Then along come the Australian impressionists, living to the same ideals as their colleagues in Paris and painting reality.  The result is the best room in the show, with dramatic canvases showing you the beauty, danger and loneliness combined in those big landscapes.  Running alongside, but not influencing, is the abstract Aboriginal tradition, highly naturalistic and seeming to grow out of the land itself.

And then we get the modern stuff.  Handfuls of it are palatable.  The Aboriginal stuff here is by far the best.  The rest?  Far too much odd concept stuff.  It certainly makes you think.  Piles of abstract forms made of white wool.  A giant neon cartoon of a suburban house.  Beautifully executed little silver sculptures of plants and trees which are, for some reason I didn't quite grasp, growing out of silver sardine tins whose lids had been rolled down to reveal vivid relief sculptures of various acts of sexual stimulation.  Hmmmm.  Methinks there was a good reason the rooms in the second part had far fewer people, Australian or otherwise, than in the first.

They must have been rushing for dinner.

The Keeper's House is a new restaurant in the corner of the Royal Academy complex, carved from the basement of this Georgian building.  They've been going less than a month and, frankly, it shows.  Good food was belittled by disorganised service and a quirky dining room.

First, the rooms.  Georgian cellars, hung with green baize walls, adorned with Victorian plaster casts of classical and Renaissance relief sculpture.  Modern white tables and chairs.  Pleasant enough, if not particularly inviting.  Two issues.  First, the acoustics are dreadful.  We started dinner at 9, the room was already half empty, and there was still an almighty din.  Certainly not a spot for a quiet, romantic dinner.  And then there's the temperature.  Evidently the Royal Academy dictates it, in order to preserve the casts.  It's freezing.  I was sitting in a steady draft hitting the back of my neck and only survived by fashioning a scarf out of a large linen napkin.  At London fine dining prices, you shouldn't be endangering your health in a drafty old basement.  Ditch the casts and turn up the heat, folks.

The jolly but confused service signalled trouble from arrival, when our table for three had been recorded as one for two so they had to regroup.  Once seated, it took far too long to get most things.  The bread didn't arrive until three minutes before our starters, our second bottle of wine took so long to appear that we had empty glasses through most of the main course and they comped us in apology.

The food is good but not worth putting up with this level of incompetence.  Especially as, like most museum venues, you're paying for the privilege of dining in such close proximity to the art.  You'll spend £40 on your three courses before you touch a drink, and the servings aren't generous.  Although they are very pretty.  It's all very arty and high concept … perhaps to mirror the goings-on upstairs.

I started with scallops in squid juice with lemon charcoal, served on a plate designed to mimic a sea shell.  Interesting flavours, attractive presentation, but the scallops were small, slightly overcooked and creeping toward cold.  (Maybe it was just the chill in the room.)  Please, don't start getting arty until you get the basics right.  My main of roasted rabbit loin also seemed just slightly overcooked. The accompanying pink fir potatoes, trompette mushrooms and sour onion were tasty, but that last vegetable had been stewed down to a stringy dark mass that, while it tasted great, didn't look particularly nice.  The best thing was undoubtably the dessert.  Bitter chocolate, caramel and ovaltine (malt).  For top distinction it just narrowly beat out our server's magnificent moustache, waxed up in curls above his beard to give him the distinct air of a pre-Raphaelite artist.  He might not have been quick, but he was charming and matched the venue.

The irony of all this is that the place is run by Oliver Payton, a man who … when not commanding his growing restaurant empire … is one of the harshest judges on the TV cookery programme Great British Menu.  He sits there in judgement of some of the UK's finest chefs, who are trying to win the right to cook a course at a national banquet.  He was there last night, looking stressed.  And so he should have.  Peyton's own restaurant has so far to go his stint on the show seems hypocritical.

At the moment, the Keeper's House proves a great truth:  It is far easier to criticise than to do it yourself.