St Pancras Grand, St Pancras Int’…

Press Reviews (9)

• Jasper Gerard (16th February 2009)
  4/10
  
  Given its “Brief Encounter” charms and “peachy” setting, this station dining room should be the perfect choice for a Valentine’s supper. But instead of a destination restaurant to show the French what Blighty can deliver, the Telegraph’s man finds “a departure restaurant, a departure from decent standards” – “a dining disaster” where a date will deliver no “more than a pecked goodbye with a ‘thank you, but I’ve got an early start’”. Service “sucks” and the “retro Brit tuck” “stinks”: it’s “bland”… “heroically hideous”… “redolent of a British Rail dining car”. [JG also pointedly notes how the Evening Standard’s, Fay Maschler, “included it in a best of the year round up”, having been “employed as an adviser by the restaurant in its first month of opening”.]
• Marina O'Loughlin (17th October 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  “With the exception of a wonderfully retro seafood cocktail and a gorgeous custard tart – thick layer of creamy-dreamy custard on crisp pastry base, bathed in butterscotch sauce and crowned with a surreal flourish of improbably long and thin Garibaldi biscuit – almost everything we eat at St Pancras Grand is disappointing.”
• Giles Coren (13th October 2008)
  Meat/fish 6, Cooking 6, Froggy-bashing 10, Score 7.33
  
  The new restaurant at St Pancras “looks terrific”, says the critic. “All the romance and cosmopolitan pizzazz of 21st-century train travel is carried off the rail and in through the doors”, and offers “a menu so perfect that it is almost a parody of where restaurants have been going in the past 18 months… It’s practically a flag. It could replace the Union Jack on top of Buckingham Palace. You want to take it out in the street and wave it in French faces, crying: “See! See!”
• Tracey MacLeod (2nd October 2008)
  3/5 Food, 3/5 Ambience, 3/5 Service
  
  “This week’s venue is more than just a restaurant; potentially it’s a national treasure”, says the critic. “They've assembled a ministry of all the talents (including the distinguished chef Richard Corrigan in an advisory role), installed a head chef with a serious pedigree, and spared no expense in fitting out the retro-glamorous dining room. The intention is clearly to create a restaurant that doesn't just cater for travellers, but stands alone as a destination venue.”
• Guy Dimond (24th September 2008)
  4/6 stars
  
  “The stunning £800 million restoration of the St Pancras is a marvel”, says the critic, and you immediately get the impression that the review of Searcy’s new restaurant there is going to be upbeat. And indeed, it turns out to be “a beauty which has clearly been inspired by the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station in New York, mixed up with Continental grand brasserie flourishes”. On the food front, the offer is a “post-St John, Hix-like menu designed to appeal to critics, gastronomes and everyman”, and its realisation rarely disappointed.
• Richard Vines (17th September 2008)
  2/4 stars
  
  A somewhat guarded reception from the critic for this very British new dining room on the way to Paris: “I’m still not completely sold on St. Pancras Grand, though its Dutch gold-leaf roof is gorgeous and – as a former British Rail train announcer [now there’s a revelation!] – I love looking at the locomotives. Even the feeling of bonhomie that descended on me over a bottle of the crisp house white… didn't make me enjoy every single dish”.
• Jan Moir (11th September 2008)
  
  The critic visits a restaurant that’s “almost completely empty”, and where the staff have been “drilled… in the art of the hard sell”. “Poor, swivel-eyed waiters loiter outside on the concourse, trying to entrap passing trade like timeshare sellers on the Spanish costas”.
• David Sexton (11th September 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  The critic visits this “beautiful” new dining room at St Pancras, where he finds food that’s “highly professional and not bad value [but] not aiming to be exceptional or challenging”, which is perhaps another way of saying that there’s quite a lot of “soothing blandness” about. This cuisine is accompanied by a “short wine-list [that’s] well-designed but distinctly steep”.
• Richard Vines (11th September 2008)
  2/4 stars
  
  Finding a “mixed picture”, the financial news service’s man likes the railway station restaurant only up to a point. The piece is of most of note, though, for two bits of news. One is the blockbuster revelation that he is a “former British Rail train announcer”, and the other is that Fay Maschler has gone into the restaurant consulting business (with the motto “get the critics before they get you”) and consulted on the operation here. Hmm.