Bord’Eaux, Grosvenor House Hotel

Press Reviews (7)

• Jay Rayner (12th May 2008)
  
  “[A] great lunch, just in the wrong room and at the wrong price” – all you really need to know about the critic’s view of the new Gallic brasserie at the Grosvenor House hotel.
• Zoe Williams (15th April 2008)
  6.5/10
  
  “I’ll tell you what the food’s like, then you tell me” – the critic inverts the normal prodedure for her review of this new brasserie of a Park Lane hotel. And indeed, the ‘review’ ends up as something of a what-I-ate recital. The (eventual) conclusion? “It’s great fun… but more like a theme park than a restaurant”. An intriguing summary, as ‘fun’ is what almost every other reviewer so far has found signally absent.
• Marina O’Loughlin (2nd April 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  Ms O’L seems to be a bit of a fan of ‘rolling-stone’ chef Ollie Couillard and his Gallic dishes. She finds prices at this new Park Lane hotel brasserie high though, and agrees with the general view of most critics so far that the setting is “slightly lugubrious”.
• Guy Dimond (2nd April 2008)
  4/6 stars
  
  Unusually, TO’s senior critic does two reviews this week. (Presumably it’s because both subjects are rather ‘retro’ in style, and he’s the only TO staffer who can remember what the ’70s/’80s were actually like!) He comes to the same conclusion as every other reviewer, pretty much – “We liked the cooking, but on our visit this cavernous rooom needed a lot more customers to fill the place and give it some buzz”. The place looks fated to be “patronised by travel-weary guests, not by demob-happy Londoners”.
• Terry Durack (1st April 2008)
  13/20
  
  The critic finds “lots of things to like” in what’s probably the most positive review so far of this grand Mayfair hotel brasserie, which he thinks is seeking to be “London’s answer to Bofinger… [or] La Coupole”. It even, he raves, has “that rare thing, an al fresco terrace with a view” – as the view is principally of Park Lane, this is presumably some sort of joke?
• John Walsh (26th March 2008)
  2/5 stars for food
  
  The critic notes that, despite having the “fittings and contents” of a genuine French brasserie, the “huge, high-ceilinged room” of the Park Lane hotel’s new brasserie is “rather bleak and glum”. And here – compare Joe Joseph’s review of L’Abisinthe – it is a matter of complaint that the array of dishes on offer “could have found this array of dishes in any French town in the 1970s, or 1960s or, indeed, 1950s” – “[d]uck confit and croque-monsieur are all very well, but sacré bleu, this is a five-star hotel, not a Relais Routier truckstop”. “I suspect they need some tougher management, to give the place some zing and rein in the chef's ideas a little”, says the critic. “And they might want to re-think the apostrophe. Sorry, apos’trophe.”
• Fay Maschler (20th February 2008)
  2/5
  
  Ms M is only somewhat impressed by the new Gallic brasserie at the Grosvenor House. Her review, we thought, has a particularly good ending. “Should the sun keep shining”, she wittily observes, “it is worth noting that there are tables on a terrace at the front - Bord'fumes”.