We at Harden’s don’t often go back: so many new restaurants, so little time. But just occasionally circumstances drag us back to a place that we’ve already reviewed, or which has already been covered by the survey. So here is the first of an occasional series we’ve called 'Second thoughts' – not substitute reviews, just some purely personal thoughts inspired by a chance revisit.
Perhaps appropriate that our first Second Thoughts are on Dinner (read our first review here), whose fame is now so great that a foodie friend who lives abroad came to visit when, and only when, we could secure a table. We’d first visited in the heady early days. How would we feel now the place was well into its stride… but the novelty, for us at least, had worn off?
To secure the prized table, we’d booked online, right at the beginning of the booking period. We hadn’t realised our own name had come through with the booking, but it must have been as it turned out the table was (a first of recent times) booked in the name of 'Harden'. Dinner is a tightly-run ship, and they notice this sort of thing – we must thank Heston for the glass of fizz which arrived at the beginning of the meal, but we didn’t get the feeling thereafter, however, that we were being especially molly-coddled.
It sets the right note for a 'big night out' at Dinner that its setting, the Mandarin Oriental, is one of the too-few 5* hotels that’s not been horribly naffed up: none of teeth-clenching vulgarity here that’s so spoilt, for example, much of the Dorchester. And the cocktail bar on the way in is really buzzy too.
We had wondered if the whole period food shtick would jar once the novelty of the concept had faded, but it did nothing to spoil our meal, and it certainly added to the fun for our guests, who were first-timers. And, as it was, the food almost invariably pleased our table of four, although there were a couple of duds. A regular steak-eater was not especially impressed by her meat, and the bread – tasty as it was – was over-baked.
In the scheme of things, though, these were quibbles. A good evening was had by all, and we left with the comfortable feeling that – for the moment at least – this is one dinner option that’s far from resting on its laurels. It may, indeed, even become a real institution.
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