English people are shit at Italian food. It's just a fact. Americans are rather good at it – they butcher the hell out of it by adding a Niagra Falls of ‘heavy cream’ and homogenise it into one calorie grenade they call ‘Chicken All-fraydough’ – but it's delicious nonetheless. But the English – no. Our sensibilities are too prim and austere to fit in with the generous Italian mindset. Our attempts at Italian food are reminiscent of the rationing era: thin, grey, invariably watered-down, made with dried stuff from the cupboard rather than fresh produce from the market. Such is the downfall of Galleria. Although, on checking the website, they call themselves ‘modern fusion’ which is a bit of a cop-out. It was pseudo-Italian, and it wasn’t very good.

It recently re-opened, newly refurbished, in a very pretty spot on the Cam opposite Magdalene. They have a riverside terrace that, in theory, you could sit out on late into the night, drinking spritzes and smoking, and pretending you’re in Venice. Except that Galleria lock the terrace come nightfall – probably for health and safety reasons – and as such you’re forced to sit inside in a harshly lit, rather poky arrangement. Oh, and they don’t have spritzes. What is this savagery?

Galleria is consciously not aimed at students. The menu is expensive – about three times the price of Clowns if you’re using the Clowns litmus test – and fussy. You could get a prawn salad for £15, if you were a fool. I instead ordered a starter salad, which didn’t have prawns. It was an Avocado and Cantaloupe salad, for a fiver, which seemed reasonable, except that when it came it was just a pile of frissee in an impenetrable, dense block, ‘topped’ with a couple of batons of red pepper, a cube of avocado and a single melon ball.

My companion had the crab linguine to start, that classic knock-off River Café (the real one) dish that is ubiquitous on every Anglo-Italian (sorry, ‘modern fusion’) menu. It arrived looking monstrously dry, just dry spaghetti with dry shavings of crab. "The sauce is underneath," the waitress said. Indeed, it was. A lake of crabby, fishy, oily water, there, underneath! The pasta was criminally overcooked – but then again, this apparently isn’t Italian food, so it's OK that it wasn’t al dente but instead collapsed in your mouth at the first bite.

Then came a tuna steak. My companion hesitatingly, erroneously, fatally ordered it ‘medium rare’ – "ask for it rare," I hissed, "they’ll incinerate it!"- but, alas, it was too late. It arrived as the invariable bit of grey shoe leather it was always destined to become, albeit quite a well-flavoured bit of shoe leather. It was ‘sat’ on a 'bed' of ‘crushed’ new potatoes. I could be snobby about ‘crushed’ new potatoes – just admit you CBA to mash them properly – but they were delicious and buttery, so I won’t.

The piece de resistance was two stuffed peppers with risotto in them. Why we ordered this tired stalwart of Cambridge vegetarian formal hall fayre is beyond me – probably because it was cheap-ish, at £10. It was filled with what was called a ‘tomato ragu’ on the menu, although it was vegetarian, confusing. Don’t you know what ragu means? It means meat sauce. Download Duolingo, its free. It didn’t matter, in the end, because the thing coating the risotto wasn’t tomato or ragu, but instead some kind of curry sauce. Risotto infused with the flavour of curry. If you can call it risotto – it was that typical English risotto, so quaint, the stodgy, solid kind made with Gallo rice that you can stand a fork upright in.

The cheapest bottle of white wine on the menu, whatever it was, was delicious. But generally, if you’re a student who doesn’t really feel like haemorrhaging cash on sub-par Italian-British-Indian ‘fusion’, then cross the road to Magdalene's Ramsay Hall, where you can get a really grim plate of collapsing pasta, some dry lettuce leaves, and an overcooked piece of fish and it will only set you back around £2.

Dinner for two with wine and service: £65. Make of that what you will.

@isocockerell