Les Freres Jacques is the kind of place that business men like for lunch. There's plenty of room between the tables so no one can overhear your conversation, there are plenty of waiters and the food is reliable. When you walk in you get an immediate impression that this is a professional establishment where everything works exactly as it should. But then, first impressions aren't always entirely accurate.

I sometimes wonder if there is such a thing as a racial stereotype: you know the sort of thing - Germans are humourless and industrious, Spaniards eat at midnight and are cruel to animals, Italians love to love and wave their arms about, the French cook well and are arrogant. If there is any validity in any these stereotypes, you can have one of them confirmed for you in Les Freres Jacques.

I was there with two guests for a business lunch which I hoped to combine with this review. This isn't terribly easy, since you have to keep stopping the flow of conversation to think about what you're eating. If there were no reviewing to be done, just business, then what you most want from a restaurant is that things simply work well and unobtrusively, so that there are no distractions from the business on hand.

We started with sparkling water at the bar before moving to the table to read the menus. The set lunch is £13.50 and it offers three courses. While we were reading the menus the waiter brought a tray of fish so that we could see what was on offer. Before Christmas I was in a restaurant in Berlin that took this technique to its logical conclusion: there was no menu at all, you were simply shown the raw ingredients for every dish - a nice bit of theatre. One of my guests chose the scallops from the tray, while my other guest and I chose saucisson en croute and cod salad from the menu as starters. We picked salmon, venison and chicken as main courses, which seemed like a good spread of choices.

The wine list is chauvinistically weighted towards French wines, which is what you'd expect. Plenty of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone and Loire and a few wines from Australia, Chile, Spain and New Zealand. Not one from Italy. However it's fairly priced at a standard 100pc mark-up which is good to see. I chose the Campo Viejo Gran Reserva '94 priced at £24.30 which was fine, but not as big as I'd hoped it might be. As the waiter poured it for my guests, I noticed that one of them had a dirty glass. I pointed this out to the waiter who put the glass of wine to one side, got another from the next table and filled that. Now I don't think of myself as a petty man, but these were large glasses and about a fifth of the bottle was now in a dirty glass, marginalised at the edge of the table. There was no apology that I noticed, simply a classic Gallic shrug that seemed to suggest I was being unduly picky. Also there was now not much left in the bottle and I had little choice but to order another.

The starters arrived, as did a basket of three different breads; tomato, raisin and, of course, baguette - all three of which were deliciously fresh and warm. The cod salad was mixed with potato and the plate was drizzled with pesto. The scallops came sliced and fanned, served on a bed of salad with a tomato sauce - a good dish. My saucisson was a fat sausage that had been cooked en croute and I was presented with a slice of it. Tasty enough, but an overcooked pastry shell.

The main courses were very good. Loin of venison sliced and fanned, served with a stuffed Yorkshire pudding; a chicken breast presented on a maize pancake that tasted far better than it looked, and a large, round salmon steak that had me wondering how it had been cut to that shape with no bones at all. With the salmon came what looked like a puree of potato sprinkled with nuts, but with a taste that defied recognition. Three of us tasted it and hazarded guesses ranging from potato and cheese to parsnips. Eventually I asked the waiter. He shrugged. 'Pomme de terre - potato?' he suggested. 'Maybe', I said, 'but potato and what?' He shrugged again. I persisted. 'Can you find out?' With all the grace and charm of poilu on the Paris Metro he went off to find out. The answer was surprising: puree of cauliflower. You may wonder if all this questioning was worth it just to find out about the puree, but it was, if only so that I can avoid it in the future.

And so to the desserts. Two mousses of light and dark chocolate, which were served with a coulis framed in a piped chocolate oblong making it look like a painting by Mondrian. I had the steamed pudding which I thought might bring back nostalgia for school food. It was an individual steamed pud filled with pineapple, and to continue the analogy, was perhaps a painting by Graham Knuttel.

Good coffee followed. I asked the waiter what kind of coffee they used. He shrugged a magnificent shrug. 'Just coffee.' He paused to turn. I pressed on. 'Do you know what kind it is?' He shrugged another exquisite shrug: I thought about our previous conversation and decided that the information wasn't worth the struggle. I mean, it would have been a small victory for perseverance, but it wasn't going to affect my life.

So there you have it. Good food and a very take-it-or-leave- it attitude by the waiters. I certainly got no inkling that there was an intention to please; the attitude seems to be that the food on your plate should be sufficient to keep you happy. There also appears to be no system in place to deal with minor cock-ups like our dirty glass. I wondered for a while if it might result in the offer of a post-prandial drink, but it didn't. Our food bill, with a 12.5pc service charge, came to £51.75, which is somewhat more than a casual glance at the menu would prepare you for.

The food is good, the surroundings are pleasant and as long as you don't mind the insouciant service, it's a comfortable room for a tete a tete. But having settled a three-figure bill, I'm left with the lingering feeling that we might have been better looked after.