There are cursed restaurants and cursed women, and this makes them no less interesting. One is Maxim’s in Paris, which knows it – it gaily sells ties in a charnel house decorated for the Masque of the Red Death – and another is the Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, which doesn’t. One day it might meet its destiny, which is to be an Angus Steakhouse (this might lift the curse, the Angus Steakhouse has its own magic) but it isn’t there yet. Restaurant after restaurant favours hope over experience here: Marco Pierre White (Mark White) passed through, spilling acronyms about. I suppose it serves it right for being in the neo-Byzantine style. Don’t restaurant developers watch horror films?

The last time I ate here was for Savini at the Criterion, about which I remember plant life and grey silks – where do the husks of restaurants go? – too much salt, and a dispute with British Telecom, which Savini claims felled it. Pah! It was the curse. The new suitor is Masala Zone, with no pun on Twilight Zone intended (though it should be). These are eerie rooms: a palazzo wrought in imperial pounds for display. In fiction Dr Watson first heard of Sherlock Holmes here in A Study in Scarlet. Bruce Wayne – or Batman to his anxious friends who knew he was an orphan and pretended he was a bat to soothe him – claimed he owned this restaurant in The Dark Knight. I should have liked to review that, but it is fictional. Did they serve flies?

To reality and hope: past the tourists snogging at Anteros (not Eros, that is an urban myth) into the glamour of Grade II-listed neo–Byzantine late Victoriana. It looks like Las Vegas so close to Lillywhites: a shimmering, duplicitous falsehood near other falsehoods, and I like it very much. Still, there is a class system in the Masala Zone: it is a restaurant in two parts: a good one at the back and a poor one at the front. It treats the clientele like an adulterer treats his wife. That is, if you are punctual – faithful – you are put in the front, which is uncarpeted and crowded, essentially a hotel lobby. My nose is by a wall at 12 o’clock. If you are late (and I wasn’t) you are taken to the plusher back, where there are marble columns and golden lattices; wild carpets and a rocking horse; ornamental elephants on poles and a painting of a bright-green cow with wings. The diners at the front make the latecomers feel fashionable, which offends this column’s sense of fairness: why have the most beautiful dining room in London and refuse to let people sit in it? I moan at the waiter: why am I in the women’s section? He shrugs as waiters do – without interest and without malice – but it is irritating. I suspect the male critics got the back part because they wrote that they loved it.

It’s the logistics, of course: a 150-seat restaurant will dehumanise the diner and the food (yet I doubt they would do this at Brasserie Zédel across the Circus. Zédel is very special). Still, squashed nose and wounded feelings aside, it is fine. It is well-priced and skilful, as it should be: it is sister restaurant to Chutney Mary, Amaya and Veeraswamy. We eat onion flower bhajis as pretty as the lattice work; a glorious chicken biryani, which you should have; impeccable dhal, lamb sliders, potatoes and breads; sorbets. It’s very functional, more than edible, and the biryani is less than £20. I recommend Masala Zone, but it does not fit the Criterion, even with its flying elephants. I don’t think earthly anything could.