I’ve always been fond of The Standard hotel — a defining feature of King’s Cross since 2019 — for its incongruous, Jetsons-esque architecture. It seems to wink flouncily at the Victorian features of the St Pancras hotel opposite, like a sexy, younger neighbour who enjoys mowing the front lawn in a bikini.

The entrance to Decimo, the Mexican restaurant on its 10th floor, feels just as space racey. At street level, I board a curved glass lift, entirely transparent on the outside, and as Plantasia-style bleeps and bloops play on the overhead speakers, I leave the station, the shops and the fast-food outlets behind, emerging into a penthouse bar area that’s all cane furniture and Santal 33.

So it’s a pity that the restaurant on the other side of the trip doesn’t always inspire quite as much wonder… other than the way your eyes will reliably pop out of your head when you see the otherworldly price of a cocktail.

Decimo underwent considerable change this year. Mexico City-born chef Paola Arenas took the reins from Peter Sanchez-Iglesias after he left London to run Gwen for Gareth Ward in rural Wales. Arenas is a seasoned hotel chef, having worked across high-end groups like Park Hyatt, Sheraton and Mandarin Oriental, and she arrived at Decimo to reshape the menu about six months before her premiership began.

Where the restaurant dealt in Spanish-Mexican fusion before, Arenas focuses on the Mexican. She says her food is rooted in “nostalgia and tradition”, with special nods to the cuisine of Milpa Alta, a region just outside Mexico City. Decimo is, however, still a hotel restaurant, and while more personal styles like Arenas’ — she cooks dishes like halibut with corn husk and pumpkin seeds, and bream with mole — should always be championed in spaces like this, which can get extremely boring and homogenous, there is also the necessary sense of needing to play to the crowd. This clash accounts for a little of the unevenness that emerges across the course of the meal.

The menu opens with drinks (your common or garden margarita — tequila, Cointreau, lime — starts at £16.50, give me strength, while a glass of house white will set you back £14; a michaelada is a more swallowable £10) and small plates to share. And as I said when I ill-advisedly went to see the Vengaboys play a festival at midday: these openers are a bit underwhelming.

Trout aguachile with guajillo and orange looks art gallery-worthy on the plate, but is forgettable in the gob: there’s just a bit too much going on, with the delicate, macerated fish feeling a bit bullied by everything else. My Baja cod taco (£10 for one) feels like one of the more people-pleasing dishes on the menu, and is fine, if quite wet. Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I could rattle off a handful of places where you can get better and more substantial for much cheaper, given London’s major taco boom over the past couple of years.

Mains, happily, fare much better. Iberico pork served à la Flintstones — that is on an ostentatiously large bone and on top of a smoothed-out salsa morita — is a little short of fabulous. The meat is as soft as a post-pub dad shaken down by his kids for £20, with a thick, decadent strip of fat running down the side, rendered so expertly that the word “chewy” temporarily leaves my vocabulary. We pair it with a simple but highly effective side of fried potatoes, and the type of fiery aioli which sees you left wanting for a snog at the end of the night (exactly what any aioli worth its garlic should be doing). And then a plate of marinated tomatoes, their sweet flavour coaxed out by sensitive seasoning and olive oil that pools in little golden bubbles on the plate.

Tres leches — airy and spiked with rum to avoid any cloying — for dessert is a must, while the dish referred to on the menu only as “piña” turns out to be a refreshing and novel combo of grilled pineapple and pineapple sorbet. The puds end proceedings on a genuinely sweet note and leave me feeling that there is, patently, lots to love at Decimo.

But at central London hotel prices, and with a slightly confused MO, it’s not an entirely convincing show all told. We head towards the elevator, and are delivered back down to the ground with more of a whisper than a bang.