Photograph: Jeff Gurwin

Three years after closing its doors, the landmark Plaza Hotel recently reopened with a $400 million makeover, new multimillion-dollar condos, $1,000-a-night hotel rooms, a spiffed-up Grand Ballroom and a refurbished centerpiece restaurant—the Palm Court—under the direction of pedigreed French chef Didier Virot (formerly of Aix). But despite taking out full-page ads in the Times to entice guests, buzz for the revamped hotel hasn’t been good. Virot, in over his head after a brief run downtown at the ill-conceived FR.OG, is doing his least distinguished cooking to date.

On a recent Friday night, three of us sank into our high-backed velvet thrones under the Palm Court’s restored-to-its-original-splendor stained-glass dome. Like a scene from The Shining, we shared the dining room with the ghosts of the grand hotel’s once-glitzy past—and virtually no one else. While the allure of the restaurant was never really the food, I’d like to think that back then it was at least edible.

That’s more than I can say for the $28 foie gras starter, which kicked off a price-gouging meal that was among the most noxious in memory. Encrusted in a thick almond-panko shell, the liver might as well have been coated in concrete. It was almost as if the crust, charred until black and hard as a puck, was a cost-cutting measure—perhaps covering up bargain-basement duck liver? Whatever the goal, Virot had managed, in a remarkable feat of reverse alchemy, to transform one of the world’s most ethereal ingredients into a dish unfit for a dog.

Serenaded by Sinatra on an endless loop, we pushed our starters around on their plates in a futile attempt to cover up the fact that we’d eaten only a few bites. Along with the foie gras, the goat-cheese terrine, a mealy room-temperature slab that was wrapped in prosciutto and stuffed with dried figs, was also inexplicably seared until black. Though it had the grainy texture of sawdust and about as much flavor, it was still superior to the tuna carpaccio, a mess of a dish featuring wide strips of cucumber and alarmingly tepid raw yellowfin covered in sour smears of horseradish yogurt. Even more disturbing, I’d seen and tasted that same concoction before, at Aix. Though the tuna had been properly chilled the first time I ate it, the flavor combination was as off-putting then as it is now.

The entrées that followed raised the criminality of the enterprise to a new level. I chewed and chewed and chewed some more on $46 rubber bands masquerading as lobster. After a few minutes, I gave up. Four scantly seasoned lamb medallions—doused tableside in an insipid red-pepper sauce with barely more flavor than tinted water—were cooked perfectly pink but gave off such a sweat-sock stench, I couldn’t interest anyone at the table in taking a bite. The chickpea–goat-cheese ravioli they came with, meanwhile, tasted strongly of freezer burn. Needless to say, that dish, too, went almost entirely uneaten. Sliced duck breast cooked until it was the color of mud—and smothered in so much cumin it was as if the spice-bottle cap had popped loose—came with a porcini-oatmeal cake that was a perfect tonal match. Though the duck was dry and the starchy cake about as interesting as Stove Top stuffing, it was the only main course we could choke down.

This time around there was no covering up our displeasure. The waitress, wearing a name tag and sensible shoes, dutifully reported back to the kitchen on our uneaten meal. “We’ve only been open two months,” she said. “The chef needs to hear when something’s gone wrong.” She returned with dessert menus and the cheerful news that the last course would be on the house.

Perhaps most puzzling about the Palm Court’s dismal state is that the pastry chef, Nicole Kaplan (formerly of Del Posto and Eleven Madison Park), is one of the stars of New York’s dessert pantheon. It’s as if Dame Judi Dench had taken a cameo in the sequel to Showgirls. Kaplan’s Plaza sweets—like brownie bites with cocoa pearls and lush salted-caramel ice cream, and a “peanut-butter cup” expressed as a rich, thick chocolate-glazed peanut-butter semifreddo—tap into the setting’s power to induce childlike nostalgia, and are as vibrant as Virot’s entrées are flaccid. If only the Palm Court had reopened not as a restaurant but as the city’s newest dessert bar.