One Canada Square was the original glass house in east London’s Gotham City, a thrilling tower with a flashing pyramid on that part of the Thames that looks like a despairing U-bend. The Daily Telegraph used to live here, on floors 11 and 12, when I was a gossip columnist; there was no floor 13, architects being afraid of beauty, and also of witches. I love Canary Wharf, and One Canada Square in particular; I always wonder — will it ever be an ancient building? Or will the flood waters overwhelm it? It is like midtown Manhattan, but less substantial, and twice as lost. It is the second tallest building in Britain, after the stupid Shard, and is, architecturally, an homage to the World Trade Center; that is not an elegy I would wish for. The architect César Pelli opened it with a speech quoting Lao Tse: ‘The reality of a hollow object is in the void and not in the walls that define it.’ How true.

Now they have installed a restaurant on the ground floor of One Canada Square, open to the lobby, and wall-less; a waiting room with food, slightly reminiscent of Superman’s ice palace, or a cinema where the only movie is the people who work here, in every shade from bored to depressed to insane. It is cold, mean and riveting.

You enter from the London Underground, which in this parish is monumental, like a spaceship, built for hordes of workers who never came. Up through a subterranean shopping centre full of shrill Christmas bustle and up again, and see the familiar lifts and barriers to the sky and, when I worked here, Charles Moore’s face. Ah, yes, I think of Die Hard. This is the Die Hard restaurant, although there is also the friendly ghost of the Daily Telegraph’s letters page. Where be Alan Rickman and his Marxist stapler?

It is, like most new London restaurants these days, hotel-esque; there should be bedrooms above with soft cushions and tiny bottles of drink, so you can get dead drunk with the worst man in the world, and hate yourself, hate everyone, but there aren’t. There is a ghostly, glittering bar and tiny tables, a dining room behind in mannish green; then a vertiginous, possibly murderous, staircase to a further dining room from which you can watch the guards and the barriers and your enemies wandering around, vulnerable from this angle, because you can see the tops of their heads and their soft, fraying hair; the vibe is poison, money, vengeance, Al Pacino as a tiny Satan in Devil’s Advocate, and, above all, masculine hair loss.

The staff are young and attractive, and kind to the new running character in this column, LB (Little Baby). LB is very suave, and dignified, and looks ridiculous in baby clothes. So I dress him as an elf. An elf in hell.

The food is the kind that men like, but dressed for women: there is a fashionable raw bar, a wide-ranging grill, Peterhead cod, Herdwick lamb, a pie of the day. I have tagliatelli with cep and truffles, which isn’t great. Truffles, like cocktails, should be only swallowed in moderation; they shouldn’t stomp around your plate, shouldn’t have opinions. H has a photogenic artichoke salad; LB sucks down air. The One Canada Square Pie, however, which I chose because I thought it might contain executives, is magnificent, gold as money. We end with a knickerbocker glory as good as its name; it’s a billion-dollar pudding for furious children.

And so, if I were an alcoholic who hated Charles Moore, and sought to drink myself to death, this would be the place. It is a restaurant for hating, waiting and dying. Canary Wharf has built a restaurant that looks like itself.