The Ritz Restaurant
Fay Maschler, Evening Standard (Rating: 2/5 stars)
“A grand hotel should offer a very particular kind of gastronomy”, says the critic. “It must honour the special occasion, reward the financially reckless, soothe the resident, gratify the regular. It needs to have a different quality to just haute cuisine and achieve the seemingly impossible combination of timelessness and thrill. Since chef Michel Bourdin left The Connaught, no London hotel has delivered it.” Ah, how true!
And only too continuingly true of her visit to this famously pretty Piccadilly dining room, where her food was pretty consistently devoid of any sort of excitement. (Some people, incidentally, have been telling us for years that the food at the Ritz is ‘getting better’ – it has never, ever been true.)
Dean Street Townhouse
The latest Richard Caring production, in Soho, may have a “slightly-too-slick” air about it, but, for the critic, “it works”. “Nuts to your Connaughts and Dorchesters with their over-egged luxury; my hotel of choice is this one.”
101 Pimlico Road
Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 2/5 stars)
“This part of Belgravia’s not short of good restaurants”, says the critic – really? – “yet 101 seems to have been packed every night since it opened”. The critic finds it a “good-looking place”, but service was “bumbling”, and the food “[in] need [of] a lot more refinement for the prices charged”.
Seventeen
Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 3/5 stars)
“Chef Wang of Seventeen used to work at Ba Shan, and together with Chef Yue, a specialist in Sichuan and Cantonese dishes, they’re now in charge of the kitchens at Seventeen, a trendy new Chinese restaurant in Notting Hill”, the critic tells us. It offers a menu that’s “a mixture of popular styles”, which includes some “unusual and interesting” dishes.
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