Why Silvena Rowe needs to kill the lights and start romancing her guests at Quince…

Of all the celebrity chefs, I thought Silvena Rowe was probably the best equipped to make a restaurant splash. She’s diva-ish, huskily foreign and talks about food with the febrile passion of a recently released prisoner. How could her restaurant be anything less than a magnificently passionate tribute to her first love ?

Yet inside her new restaurant Quince, it’s not Rowe, but her Mayfair environs that set the tone.

Despite rich-red banquettes, a marble bar and gorgeous glass panelled screens, your eye is drawn to the open slide door that leads to The Mayfair Hotel’s lobby.

It’s hard to imagine you’re in a plush, Persian den when you can hear people checking in for a two-night stay.

Also, the restaurant’s large ground-floor windows have been left free from curtains. So the depressingly grey light of Mayfair washes out the restaurant’s vivid colours, jolting you back to British reality.

Happily, the food was everything I’d been hoping for. Each dish deeply personal and well thought through, living up to the power of her recipe books Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume and Orient Express

The duck and foie gras spiced filo parcels with pistachio were utterly delicious. Exotic, silkily fatty, with a warm edge. And the wine was insanely good. A Lebanese rose elixir tasting of nuts, apricots and caramel… with some peach perhaps? (Château de Musar Rosé, Gaston Hochard, Bekka Valley, Lebanon, 2004/6: £45). Only the blueberry and coriander molasses glazed belly of pork was disappointingly bland.

But this delicious dinner was not enough to have me wanting more. Where was the drama, the excitement and the passion of Rowe? I could taste it, but couldn’t quite feel it.

Curtains on the windows and closing the door might be a good start.