Who remembers the large Oxford store operated by Belfast Linen, a company that appears to have departed from the national scene? It occupied large premises opposite the main entrance to the New Theatre. In 1996 it became a pub, the Wig and Pen, during the flurry of shop conversions — this one cost Morland £750,000 — that transformed George Street into the centre of revelry it is today.

Three or four years ago, the place was refashioned and turned into Copa. It has since become popular with a wide range of customers for its continental beers, cocktails and fairly priced wines. Rosemarie and I are in the habit of visiting for a glass of wine before the theatre; last Friday we popped across for chardonnay in the interval of John Cleese’s show.

Copa is a performance venue itself and has become more recognised as such over the past couple of weeks when its top floor room has been used for a variety of shows offered as part of Oxfringe. Some of them are reviewed in The Oxford Times today.

On Tuesday night, when I decided to sample Copa’s food for the first time, there was no show on, though preparations were perhaps taking place for one. At any rate, a group of talented Oxford University jazz players had been displaced from upstairs to give their weekly jam session (for the last time this term) down in the bar. Their cool sounds were a welcome accompaniment to the later stages of our meal.

The menu offered here is interesting in its variety if not always, as we found, well managed in its execution. It includes sandwiches, jacket potatoes, burgers, salads and ‘nibbles’ as well as dishes offered under the more conventional headings of starters, main courses and desserts. Taking these in turn, one could try, perhaps, soup, crab cake or duck spring rolls, followed by a steak, fish and chips, chilli con carne or sweet potato, apricot, chickpea and red pepper kebabs, before finishing with strawberries and cream, a chocolate and walnut brownie or apple pie.

Rosemarie and I both began with ‘nibbles’. Mine was a rather delicious roasted red pepper and three bean houmous, the whole so well blended that it was impossible to identify which varieties of bean they were. It was served with ‘artic’ flat bread. Artic? Me neither. These two squares of unleavened bread were tightly rolled as linen napkins sometimes are. Rosemarie had three home-made fish fingers. These were good — generous chunks of fish (pollack, I thought, or possibly coley) deep-fried in batter. The tartare sauce was at once both sweet and slightly bitter, and also glutinous.

My main course was, steaks apart, the most expensive dish on the menu, at £9.95. For that, frankly, one deserved better than the desiccated dish I was offered. This was dry to the point of being chewy chicken breast, stuffed with a dark brown substance the menu told me was goat’s cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and spinach, wrapped in prosciutto. Rarely can meat have been more in need of the tomato and herb dressing and blobs of herb pesto also supplied.

The state of the ‘new’ potatoes, baked until they were quite soft, supplied further evidence that the whole dish had been cooked well in advance of its delivery (by a good-mannered and efficient waiter-cum-barman). The same applied to Rosemarie’s cheese and bacon burger, in which the beef was cooked dry and grey with no trace of the fresh coriander flavour promised. It also came with cheddar rather than the blue cheese ordered. The chips were fine but the fennel coleslaw was cloyingly sweet.

To finish she had Belgian waffles and vanilla ice cream, which were fine though they came with none of the advertised clotted cream. I had a glass of Aussie shiraz so spicily fruity it almost qualified as a pudding itself.