Ripples at Chowder Bay

Chowder Bay's water sparkles like sapphires and sailing boats drift by silently. There's the odd splash when scuba divers go flipper-up and young kids with pale, chubby legs play near the shore.

At Ripples, we wait at the door as the sign dictates. And we wait. And we wait.

When we're finally met, they don't greet us - we are very briskly asked for our reservation name, and we're sat down on transparent chairs. Outside in the main dining area, long tables of men in pink polo shirts and ironed jeans flop lazy, tanned arms around women in white linen, while inside is a space geared for weddings with large round tables topped with huge pastel flower arrangements.

We start with arancini - rice balls with a mozzarella centre and a strong hint of saffron that are okay without being great.

In fact, cheese is the dominant element in all the entrees on our table. Crumbed, fried mozzarella is stretchy and more-ish, relieved with a peppery salad of rocket, capers and olives while some sweet little scallops served on the half shell are confusingly weighed down with a goat's cheese sauce.

Roast bone marrow with parsley salad is a take on that Fergus Henderson (see review of Fergus' book p23) classic. The original dish sees veal shin bones roasted until slightly browned on the outside with the marrow soft, warm and salty on the inside. This is then spread over dry, grilled slices of toast and topped with a vinegary salad of parsley and capers. Here, the toast is buttered on both sides and the pale bones have been topped with cheese. The result is incredibly fatty and not particularly pleasant.

Service is pretty shaky from go - youngsters snatch water bottles off our table without offering refills and one poor girl struggles with our wine for five minutes, trying to take the foil off. She's visibly upset and eventually a senior member of staff comes over and opens the wine for her. The result is a bottle that appears to have been savaged
by a vicious dog.

Grilled prawns with chilli and garlic are let down by overcooked angel hair pasta and the half duck roasted on a bed of cabbage isn't served with lardons as advertised - instead, it arrives with undercooked slices of bacon. And this is the best thing on the menu.

The meringue is described as 'chewy' but we find a crisp cloud of meringue with sweetened mascarpone and bitter, stringy rhubarb.

Nobody says goodbye as we leave - they just stare until we're out the door. It's not very often you leave a restaurant feeling empty but this is a rare exception.