Photograph: Jeff Gurwin

For most of his movie career, Robert De Niro has taken the high road, inhabiting serious roles with an artist’s intensity. His early forays into the restaurant business followed a similarly sober path. Instead of going for the quick blockbuster buck—the Planet Hollywood route—he signed up with the food-world equivalent of auteur directors, working with Drew Nieporent and Nobu Matsuhisa to transform his Tribeca neighborhood into a gastronomic destination.

In the past decade or so, the Oscar-winning master of menacing bad guys has been taking roles with considerably less gravitas (Meet the Parents…?). Ago, which opened recently on the ground floor of his own Tribeca hotel, is the sort of restaurant you might expect from the slapstick De Niro. (He was also an investor in the hugely successful West Hollywood original, which opened in 1997.)

I can’t speak to Ago the first or its sequels in Las Vegas and South Beach, Florida—the menu, by founding chef Agostino Sciandri, is virtually identical at all four locations—but Ago Part IV: Agostino Takes Tribeca should’ve gone straight to video. The restaurant, a sort of upmarket California Carmine’s, feels like a back-lot version of a big-city trattoria, a work of pure cinematic artifice—not Goodfellas but Analyze This.

The high-ceilinged dining room—featuring wood beams, tall curtained windows and blown-glass fixtures—is attractive but soulless, with miserable acoustics and tables crammed so close together, waiters can barely slip past without threatening to topple your wine.

Those waiters—the staff is mostly male and mostly Italian—all seem as though they were hired by a casting director, as if stocking the place with off-the-boat accents somehow guarantees authenticity. When we arrived for our reservation one night, the maître d’, an arrogant dandy in an impeccable suit—think Ricardo Montalban, if he hailed from Milan—dismissively announced that our table wasn’t quite ready, then marched off without another word. Ten minutes later we were escorted to our table for two, squeezed in between raucous groups.

Bread, the first dire sign that the restaurant didn’t only feel like a Bennigan’s, tasted as if it had been sliced six hours earlier. I placed my order for lamb chops. “How you like them?” asked the waiter. “Medium? Well-done?” I can’t remember the last time I heard “well-done” as a de facto temperature for restaurant lamb. Was it my imagination, or was he snickering under his breath—like a waiter in a Venetian tourist trap—about the meal to come?

The most egregious stuff emerging from the kitchen was the most far-reaching. An offbeat cuttlefish starter showed visual promise, with three miniature skewers balanced on a bed of beans with an artful smear of squid ink on the plate. My hopes for the dish were dashed in a single bite—the beans completely without flavor, the gluey cuttlefish coated in a burnt bread-crumb crust. A straightforward eggplant-Parmesan appetizer, crispy on top and gooey within, was meanwhile far more satisfying—in a cheap-eats neighborhood restaurant way (though Ago clearly hopes to be much more than that).

The restaurant is a dream, however, for low-sodium (read: no-flavor) dieters. The lamb chops were perfectly pink inside but almost completely without seasoning—as were the baby artichokes served underneath them. Pastas, listed on the menu under the heading primi, are incongruously available only in large portions. The spaghetti with clams, said to be De Niro’s favorite, strays from the classic formula in a number of misguided ways, plucking the clams—so gritty they crunched—from their shells; adding overcooked broccoli rabe to the mix; and, most unforgivable of all, leaving out garlic (and salt).

The star attraction on the dinner menu is the 22-ounce Bistecca Fiorentina, touted on the restaurant’s website as its signature dish. The steak, a T-bone, is $54. I imagined a slab so daunting it would test even the appetite of Tony Soprano. Instead of a big, sizzling monster I received an average-size chewy steak tasting just slightly better than run-of-the-mill, surrounded by a few dreary rosemary-scented roasted potatoes.

Given the restaurant’s savory track record, my dessert expectations were low. There they were, all the usual suspects—tiramisu, biscotti, gelato, semifreddo, panna cotta. The semifreddo, as clumsy and artless as that cuttlefish starter, featured a melting blob of frozen hazelnut cream topped with a thick, jaw-breaking shard of hazelnut brittle. A leaden apple-raisin tart was like a miniature pie from an Easy-Bake Oven.

In spite of the restaurant’s considerable culinary shortcomings, the tables around me nonetheless seemed thrilled to be along for the ride. Perhaps—with cell-phone cameras at the ready for a Tinseltown sighting—the food wasn’t really the draw.