On the night we were there we walked past five or six places with interesting menus in the space of 10 minutes. It was early on a Wednesday evening and the streets were emptier than I'd ever seen them. Ghost town. Or city. I meant city. A January thing, we supposed, that makes it hard to know how all these places manage to survive.

Cafe Sol does a good lunchtime trade with a menu that pushes beyond soup and sandwiches into the territory of interesting cookery. It's a warm room, terracotta walls, colourful paintings and frilly chairs that made me nervous.

They do a deal midweek with two courses available for 19 and three for 23. We were slightly thrown by the menus, which had clips on them, leaving the prix fixe and lunch menu revealed, but keeping a couple of pages concealed. What do they think is going to happen? It's like the gun on stage thing . . . if it's there in Act One, it's got to be fired by Act Three.

Stick a clip on a menu and people are going to have to look behind it. We justified it to ourselves on the basis that they might have been left on in error since lunchtime. Didn't really matter. Off they came. What we found behind was a sexy a la carte menu that showed where this place had got its reputation. All sorts of funky French stuff that we began to lust after. When the guy came to take our order he saw what we'd done and didn't seem to find it very funny. Ah no.

Impossible to sustain a full dinner menu in the middle of the week in January, he told us. Lunch menu and fixed price only. And they would be closing at halfseven. Left us 45 minutes to get ourselves sorted.

Disappointing. I understood the motivation but still. The process of pining had begun. We'd seen the promised land and now had to settle.

In fairness, it wasn't that much of a hardship. The usual sandwich and panini thing extended with a short menu of straightforward French bistro food. Duck salad was good. When it arrived I thought it hadn't been dressed but it turned out to be nicely done, a certain Gallic confidence in its simplicity, just sliced, well-seasoned duck with mixed leaves, onion and semi sun-dried tomato lightly-dressed. Leek and potato soup was okay but nowhere near as luxurious and silky as it should have been. Possibly to compensate for this, it came in a bowl the size of my head. My companion struggled for a while and eventually gave up, in danger of drowning in the soupiness of it all.

Grilled salmon came with herby cous cous and confit tomatoes. Straightforward, perfectly fine. Fishcakes were a mix of salmon, white fish and a small amount of something smoked with mashed potato and herbs.

Generous portion. Comfort food, nice flavour at first but gradually saltiness became pervasive. They came with a well-dressed salad.

Striploin steak had gratin dauphinoise and a roast shallot sauce as accompaniments.

Flavoursome meat nicely cooked and textbook potatoes. Desserts were great. We ordered an apple and mixed berry crumble which was pretty glorious and a 'Very Chocolatey Brownie' which was indeed very chocolatey. Good quality coffee was served in a cafetiere. We had a bottle of Saint Emilion which tasted a lot more expensive than it was. The bill for all this came to 95.

In a way, it's hard to say if this really is a review of Cafe Sol. The food was fine, competently cooked and presented. They have to live with the reality of quiet midweek nights and have come up with a compromise that offers a good deal.

At just over 30 a head, I think we got real value. But the knowledge that we weren't seeing exactly what they're capable of made it a somewhat frustrating experience. If we hadn't unclipped our menus, we wouldn't have known what we were missing and it might have been a happier experience.

But as I said, already, what do they expect? We're only bloody human.