Typical Penarth restaurant: great ambitions, not all realised

I've just eaten a stunning piece of lamb. It was beautifully tender, deliciously pink, but with a seared crust packed with flavour. Sadly this is the one I cooked myself for tea tonight, not the one I paid £16 for in The Fig Tree last night.

Let's be clear - opening a new restaurant is not easy. Chefs will evaporate the day before opening, waiting staff will turn out to be butter-fingered, and the builders will charge twice what they promised and finish a week after you open. So we should applaud the owners of Penarth's popular Foxy's deli just for getting a hot meal to our plates in reasonable time and without organisational carnage. They've done quite a few things right as well. The interior is classy without being fussy, there's the added entertainment of the chefs sweating away in an open kitchen, and the menu has been compiled with some attention to a variety of tastes and prices (although I really don't need a list of food options and prices to be labelled 'the menu....' in large letters). If there's one teething problem it's the Siberian gale which blows through the lower level, apparently issuing from hopelessly fitted doors and a suspicious key hole. So make sure to wear your thermals, and ideally take a duvet (this was only September as well).

A dodgy door is easily forgiven. Some uninspiring food is more of a killer. There are some high points, such as the sizable pear and walnut tart on the starter menu, and a main course of shredded pork which had received some very loving attention in the kitchen and showed it. However, a lot of the rest was, well, boring. The sweet potato soup had pretentions to grandeur with its foam but failed to match sophisticated style with sophisticated taste. And the warm black pudding was pleasant, but could have done with some more oomph in the spice department. Puddings were very dull indeed, totally lacking in any contrast on the plate. The chocolate brownie was really just a sweet chocolate sponge, with a sweet creme Anglaise, and a very sweet chocolate goo. It was crying out for some nuttiness, or perhaps a bitterness in the chocolate topping.

And so to that lamb, which promised the indulgence and artistry of a rack with fondant potatoes and celeriac puree. The potatoes were good enough, and I could cope with the over-creamed and under-seasoned puree, but the lamb was a crushing disappointment. Pink is great, but a well-cooked lamb shouldn't be this tough to cut, this chewy, this fatty. Much of it was on the point of raw, and even that could have been excused if it tasted stunning. But it didn't. And it really isn't that hard to convert good quality local meat to a treat on the plate. Believe me. I've just cooked one to prove it.

We shouldn't be too harsh. The Fig Tree seems to be popular, at least at weekends, and it's being run with the best of intentions and a good dose of hard graft. But there was nothing to make me excited, nothing to make me run out and tell all my friends to go there. And definitely nothing to make me stop cooking my own lamb rather than paying someone else to do it.