No.20, Sanctum Soho

Press Reviews (2)

• Tracey MacLeod (1st June 2009)
  Food 3/5 stars, Ambience 3/5 stars, Service 3/5 stars
  
  The critic visits the dining room of what’s been “billed as London’s first rock‘n’roll hotel”, and finds a “smallish dining room [that] makes a valiant stab at high-style retro glamour, without quite pulling it off”. She is “pleasantly surprised by the unshowy modern- British fare on offer” but “there was no escaping the fact that we were on our own in a near-empty hotel dining room. No rock stars, no magnums of Cristal being cracked open, and only the soundtrack of Nineties-style chill-out music to ease the come-down.”
• Guy Dimond (14th May 2009)
  3/6 stars
  
  TO’s head man is obviously unimpressed with how the £20 million invested in the new Sanctum Soho hotel has been spent. In the restaurant, No.20, “[t]offee colours dominate, with some mismatched chairs that look like a job lot from a burlesque outfitters”. He observes that “Mark Fuller’s places tend to land just the right side of tacky because he manages to create great food”. His meal here is “mostly good” – even though, curiously, most dishes are also described as “wide of the mark” – but it doesn’t do enough to distract from the “tedious ‘Now That’s What I Call Dodgy R&B’” music, and the objectionable fellow diners: “Jodie Marsh lookalikes and... middle-aged geysers”.