The Cinnamon Club appears on lists of MPs favourite restaurants: if they can still eat this late into a parliament. It lives in the old Westminster Library on Great Smith Street, a curiously bloodless part of London, and an irresistible metaphor wherever you are. When once you ate knowledge, you now eat flesh, but only if you can afford it. Now there is the Charing Cross Library, which lives next to the Garrick Theatre, and looks curiously oppressed. Perhaps soon it will be a falafel shack and knows it. There is also the Central Reference Library, which could be a KFC, and soon will be. Public spaces are shrinking. They will all be online soon, and we will see how that goes. (It will be bad.)

The Cinnamon Club, which identifies as ‘fine dining’, seeks finesse. What for?

It is smooth, to be sure: that is the point of it. The exterior is red brick with pinnacles: a late Victorian stage set for a light opera about imperial power. It still says ‘Westminster Public Library’ in stone: it is grave and grave-stone. The interior is municipal plus money, lots of it: the Cinnamon Club is, among other things, a perfect paradigm of Blairite dreams – it arrived in 2001, as if in homage to that ideal. There is a lobby with a shop selling mortars and pestles for £30 and tea towels at three for £20 (slightly more than Sainsbury’s). The dining room has bright white plasterwork, high ceilings, eerie lamps like glowing planets, pale parquet floors and blue banquettes with grey chairs. That is, it looks like the Conran Shop. It is filled with books at least: above my head I find James Herriot’s Yorkshire, Sons and Lovers, and The Comedies of Plautus. Their cataloguing system is a mess. But if you wish to eat self-conscious and expensive Indian food while reading The Comedies of Plautus near parliament, this is close to an ideal.

I like my Indian food fierce and gaudy but, like Gymkhana in Mayfair, this restaurant, which identifies as ‘fine dining’ and specialises in game and fish, seeks finesse. What, and who, for? We have clove-smoked saddle of Romney Marsh lamb with corn and yoghurt sauce and keema saag for £32, though chargrilled Balmoral estate venison is an amazing £40. Perhaps the venison got a taxi from Heathrow. The lamb is overwrought: it looks better than it tastes. Chicken Rezala – tandoori chicken breast, poppy and screw-pine sauce, with pilau rice (£24) – feels equally punishing. Simply put, there isn’t enough heat or cream here. Pudding – black cardamom brûlée, mango sorbet – is better, but it still feels like self-denial, and who goes to an Indian restaurant in London for that?

MPs are the answer, and I pity them more than ever: first 24-hour news, now this. But after a chilly, tasteful meal, I think I understand why they come here. I have reviewed parliamentary food. I did the Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin Greasy Spoon (it isn’t called that) where you can eat Crunchy Nut Cornflakes under Pugin tiles. I have been to the ‘contemporary casual’ Adjournment in Portcullis House, which is like a John Lewis café with power, and the Peers’ Dining Room, which is a themed restaurant in which someone screamed ‘Mouse!’ into the abyss as I ate smoked salmon. They are heavily subsidised by you, but they are not restful: they are as melodramatic as Alton Towers. The food in the Cinnamon Club is no better, but the air is muted, and it’s a good five minutes from hell. Perhaps that is what they need after all that shouting, but many of them will be free quite soon.