So here’s the thing. If you’re a restaurant in London, you have to have a thing. You have to be different, or exceptionally good, or have a stunning venue, or a bit of history behind you. You need amazing produce, a kitchen that can do something extraordinary with it, or at the very least one dish that makes you want to tell everyone about it.

And I’m struggling to work out what Coopers’ thing is.

We popped in early one evening for dinner with a group of six. The service was friendly enough, although a little disorganised. A few missed drinks orders, a shortage of limes, the sort of minor hiccups that individually are no big deal but collectively leave you wondering whether anyone is entirely in charge of proceedings.

Nothing disastrous, you understand. Just a little odd.

Then came the food. Fish cakes to start, which were perfectly nice but hardly the sort of thing you’ll be thinking about on the train home. For the main course, steak. Again, perfectly alright. Cooked and presented without any great drama, but lacking the sort of flavour that makes a steak worth ordering in the first place.

And that, really, is the problem. Everything was fine. The service was fine, the food was fine, and the dining room was, well, fine.

But London is not short of places to eat. It is a city packed with restaurants competing for your attention, your money and, increasingly, your Instagram feed. To survive, let alone thrive, you need to give people a reason to choose you over the hundreds of alternatives. A little theatre, perhaps. A memorable dish. Some exceptional hospitality. Or simply food that makes you sit back and think, goodness, that was rather wonderful.

I kept waiting for Coopers to reveal its hand. For something to arrive that would explain the appeal, or for some moment of brilliance that would pull the evening together. But it never really happened.

Perhaps I’m missing something. Perhaps we ordered the wrong dishes. Perhaps there’s a signature plate lurking somewhere on the menu that would change my mind entirely.

But based on our visit, Coopers felt like the restaurant equivalent of pH 7. Entirely neutral. Neither offensive nor exciting. No sharp edges, no great highs, no real lows. Just a perfectly balanced absence of anything particularly memorable.

And while neutrality might be a perfectly respectable scientific achievement, I’m not convinced it’s much of a restaurant strategy.

I can’t quite tell you why you should go to Coopers. More importantly, I can’t quite tell you why you should go back.

And in London, that’s a rather difficult thing to get away with.