The Goring Hotel, which has been open for 100 years, is celebrating by putting on its restaurant menu a selection of dishes drawn from the various periods through which it has lived. It is a fun idea, though not necessarily the happiest route to a good meal.

I solely chose items that were marked as significant. And so from the "Thatcher years" came fillets of soused herring which, like the woman whose name they took, left a nasty aftertaste. This was food for people who had lost all their own teeth and then misplaced the replacements. They were mushy and dull.

Disappointing dishes

For my main course, I had, from those marked "War years and rationing", the steamed oxtail pudding. All I can say is that you can take a theme too far. A thick suet shell gave way to not very much at all and certainly not the luscious, gravy-slicked strands of meat I had expected.

The war has been over for 65 years. I didn't need to re-experience the privations in a luxury-hotel dining room. A shamefully tiny number of curiously pink nuggets of slightly tough meat clung to the doughy enclosure as if for safety. I finished in the Edwardian era, with jam roly poly and custard. The dish was lousy and the portion small. In the middle of a custard lake sat a tiny roll of more suet, enclosing a smear of jam, as if they hadn't restocked since King Edward was on the throne. And all this for £47.50 (Dh273).

My companion, who had suggested the Goring, had thought that a place that had endured for so long would specialise in the eternal verities. There is something solid and reliable about the hotel, from the bowler-hatted door staff through to the plush bar and the Viscount Linley-designed dining room.

We got to study that dining room in some detail, because it was never more than a quarter full, leaving waiters with too little to do. They wandered the room attempting to fill glasses with more water if you took but one sip. They are the kind of waiters who make the provision of a new napkin because yours has dropped to the floor feel like an admonishment, not a service.

A few good points

That is not to say the Goring doesn't have its virtues. Around us we witnessed some lovely theatre: beef wellington, with an eye of meat the colour of velvet plush, being carved tableside; Dover sole being deftly filleted. My tablemate didn't eat badly either: a glazed lobster omelette, with a reasonable amount of the crustacean; grilled calf's liver with onion gravy and crisp meat and, at the end, a tidy, sweet apple tart with a walnut ice-cream. Nice but not exceptional.

Most curious was the pricing regime. The lobster omelette was included among the dishes available for £47.50 (Dh273), as was the smoked salmon, cod and sea bass. Other things carried bizarre supplements. Why would you have to pay an extra £7.50 (Dh43) for bleeding potted shrimps? (That's a mild expletive, not a food description.) Why was there an extra £4 (Dh23) for the calf's liver? It made no sense at all.

The fact is that, for a long while, this sort of food (which, done well, can be fabulous) went out of fashion. That's what places such as the Goring and the old pre-Ramsay Connaught were for. But now you can get it for much less money at restaurants across London and you don't have to endure the glowering mood.

Clearly, there are people who like the Goring or it would not have survived for a century. Sadly, I'm not one of them.