Apsleys, Lanesborough Hotel

Press Reviews (10)

• Giles Coren (29th March 2010)
  Cooking 2/10
  
  The critic sets out “determined to hate” this Heinz Beck restaurant in the swanky Lanesborough Hotel, thanks to the exorbitant cost of the Mother's day set lunch (£90 a head) and ultimately succeeds. Despite enjoying the “stuttering grandeur” of the dining room, he concludes that the chef “really, really can't cook”. After “bitter and rank” artichoke soup, the Beck signature main course proves to be “a chewy pigeon lazily hacked into four and catastrophically blackened like a bad mistake”. “I started to think Beck must be a great chef after all, because you would need a serious mastery of the elements of cooking to create something this nasty”. (Although the critic doesn't make the point, this is a place that’s just been been awarded a Michelin star.)
• Matthew Norman (9th November 2009)
  
  “There are 57 varieties of reason to loathe Apsleys: A Heinz Beck Restaurant”, says the critic, “among them the use of that name to justify charging triple-star prices for the work of underlings while its owner does the real business in another land [Rome, Italy]. But the worst of it is a room of such hideously overbearing opulence to inspire a parasexual fantasy featuring gelignite… ‘My God”, said my friend clocking the horror, ‘one glance and it sucks the soul out of you.’”
• Marina O'Loughlin (5th November 2009)
  2/5 stars
  
  The “clenched luxury” of this “superluxe” Belgravia dining room, now under the auspices of Rome’s leading chef, does not impress the critic. On the upside, “breads and puddings are immensely tasty” and pasta is “a strength”, but otherwise the whole thing is “a bit bewildering”. The meal includes “one spectacular duffer”: “[s]omewhat slimy fish… on a bed of chickpea mousse that's like hot hummus, bizarrely adorned with what appear to be Rice Krispies… for the cost of £30”, and overall her lunch “is not an enjoyable experience”.
• Feargus O’Sullivan (11th September 2009)
  3/5
  
  This restaurant at The Lanesborough – now taken over by star Rome-based chef Heinz Beck – remains an “uptight” place with “OTT decor” and “gauntlet of eager staff”, says the critic. However, Beck has introduced “an inventive, astronomically expensive menu of delicate but rich Italian haute cuisine”. Everything sampled is “gorgeous”, if not necessarily worth “150 smackers for two”.
• AA Gill (12th May 2008)
  2/5 stars
  
  For reasons unexplained, the critic devotes most of his review to Washington DC. He finally gets around to visiting the new restaurant at the grand hotel at Hyde Park Corner, which he finds “remodelled from a mad Victorian conservatory into a grey, depressed space of timid modernity and muddy light”.
• Guy Dimond (8th May 2008)
  4/6 stars
  
  Rather counter-intuitively, TO’s head man is pretty much swept away by the “opulent” new dining room at the Lanesborough, where the service is “attentive”, and where the “simple rustic Italian” fare seems almost invariably to satisfy.
• Zoe Williams (6th May 2008)
  6.5/10
  
  More highlights than lowlights illuminate the critic’s meal at the opulent Italian newcomer at the Lanesborough.
• Terry Durack (6th May 2008)
  13/20
  
  Rather like the Telegraph’s lady, the Indie’s man has an experience with real ups, as well as downs, at an establishment which offers “perfectly acceptable Italian urban peasant food”, as well as “fish knives, formality and fuss”.
• Marina O'Loughlin (1st May 2008)
  
  Ms O’M kicks off her review of the “overblown pan-Italian” restaurant at the Lanesborough with an account of a dish which “looks as unedifying as it tastes”. Not helped by the fact that she visits with her Italian mother, her account doesn’t improve.
• Fay Maschler (10th April 2008)
  2/5 stars
  
  “[Why did] they name it after the London house of that famous Italian the first Duke of Wellington?”, muses the critic, bemused by the mismatch between name and culinary style of this new grand hotel dining room. Indeed, she thinks it may be fortuitous the extent to which the extravant décor has little particularly Italian about it: “if, in a little while, the management decide to re-style the restaurant as Russian or Belgian or Lebanese or Las Vegas or even English, the surroundings will still do their duty in predicting and producing formal service, expensive wines and large bills.” This lack of focus contributes to an establishment which, overall, she finds something of a “muddle”.