I suppose, now the dust has settled so to speak after my visit, the lasting impression is one of enormous disappointment. Our evening was, in retrospect, one long anti-climax. We both visited Zeitwerk with high expectations that awaiting us would be an evening of bravura...culinary skill deployed on the finest ingredients the Harz region has to offer. This is, after all, what the restaurant's Michelin star and Robin Pietsch's glittering profile as one of Germany's star young chefs had led us to expect. I don't wish to be cruel or unpleasant but there is no escaping the fact that when you come away from a place like this, feeling as we did, it's like being cheated out of what's been promised. Nobody was setting out to rob or swindle us, of course, but the customer here has a right to expect the very best and that is not, definitively not, what we got. We left this soi-disant 'temple of food' both spiritually unfulfilled and gastronomically, well, empty. Unless the dishes are each and every one brilliant, serving up 14 courses the size and substance of an average amuse-bouche will merely be precious and pretentious. The fact that the majority of the items on the evening's menu (there is only one menu; there is only one sitting) were just rather ordinary, underneath all the presentational flim-flam, is unforgivable. Not one of the warm dishes was memorable: neither the cube of belly pork, nor the shards of wild boar, nor dullest of all the tiny square of salmon trout with mean little shavings of asparagus in a prissy spoonful of vapid broth. Some of the cold dishes did stand out. The mustard egg with poppy seed promised so much as the second course. There was a raw beef dish called Hackus Ohne Knieste which is a version of a regional speciality that was meltingly delicious. I did feel cheated by this dish, however. It came in a china funnel which, to my horror, too late, I realised was no more than one-third as deep as it appeared. And it was small enough to begin with, even before our hopes of getting more than a mere mouthful were dashed. And that was the other unforgivable thing about Zeitwerk. As I said, if you're going to do this kind of thing, you need to do it memorably, brilliantly, you need to astonish and delight, take the breath away and make the taste buds dizzy with each distillation of skill and ingredient. And you need to do it with flair and elan. Dazzling speed, as one taste sensation surmounts the other. There is no place for mediocrity. Mediocrity is what we got at Zeitwerk, personified for me by the one course of any substance, a sort of chi-chi version of a typical German breakfast that included a small loaf, presumably to assuage the need for actual sustenance. There is no place, particularly, for mediocrity at a snail's pace. Making people wait up to half an hour between microscopic courses while the hunger pangs grow and gnaw, is not my idea of treating customers with respect. If this is a temple of food, it's a pretty chilly one. Nor is it worth what you are made to pay to worship here.More