Evening Standard
David Ellis was puzzled – and deeply disappointed – by a lunch in the Beaumont hotel’s new restaurant from chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen that was “expensive”, at £230 for an alcohol-free meal for two without pudding.
“The problem with charging lots of money,” he said, “is that guests do have to get something in return. Fair’s fair. At Rosi, it’s not eminently clear what that is: the restaurant is dull to the point of vagueness. I could not tell you who it is for, what it is like or what its intentions are.”
The food seems “lost” – billed as ‘modern British’, it consists of trad dishes such as ‘old-fashioned pork pie, calves’ liver with bacon, and chicken (not steak) Diane, all unsuccessfully modernised, alongside those “dreaded hotel restaurant concessions, pasta and pizza to appease picky guests”.
On the credit side, beef tartare prepared tableside and hash brown bites were delicious, while service was “as good as any in London — attentive but not cramping”.
David Ellis - 2025-11-16The Times
Giles Coren echoed David’s putdown in an even more damning review.
“Week after week I try to persuade you that such and such a wonderful place has to charge this sort of money because of what it costs to run a restaurant nowadays. But none of them takes the mickey quite like this. And none of them does it on such poor, poor cooking. I was, frankly, flabbergasted. Stay away, my friends. Stay well away.”
Giles Coren - 2025-11-16The Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell enjoyed himself at the new restaurant that has replaced the Colony Grill Room in the Beaumont hotel – named, William suggested, by the hotel’s owner, the financier Wafic Saïd, after his wife to appease her after he had named a race horse after a friend’s wife (the Lady Carla).
Anticipating a “country-house-hotel posh menu of scallops with apple and cheese” from chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen, William was relieved to find instead a selection of “pork pies and smoked salmon, calf’s liver and bacon, fish fingers and steaks”.
His meal started with a “glorious” and “irresistible” seafood cocktail, “a dish as magnificent as it was retro; bulbous, juicy prawns, sauce creamy but with bite, a tangy slice of grapefruit and some crunchy lettuce”. Almost as good were chicken Kyiv which “exploded with melted butter when sliced into” and was served with “sublime mash and a dainty sprinkle of truffle”, and Mayfair millionaire tart, “a deeply rich and gorgeous concoction”.
William Sitwell - 2025-11-23The Times
Jay Rayner was thrilled by a retro-70s menu at the revamp of the Beaumont hotel’s former Colony Grill – pork pie, chipolatas with “British beer mustard”, seafood cocktail, steak served with onion rings, ice cream sundae to finish – hailing it as a “glorious northern insurgency” in Mayfair, “done with real panache” by chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen of Northcote in Lancashire in cahoots with fellow Lancastrian Stuart Procter, the hotel’s general manager.
The performance piece was the chicken Kyiv, “which comes with hillocks of buttery mash topped with white truffle, a choice of bone-handled steak knife, and a thick, black leather tabard” – this last ostensibly to guard against garlic butter splash-back, but to Jay’s mind “hilariously kinky”.
Jay also trod carefully into what he described as the nerdy world of ramen – where devotees fret over such details as broth viscosity and noodle bite, and whose most interesting examples in the UK are outside London. Among them is western-trained chef Pete Dovaston, who has Maneki Ramen operations in Worcester and now Birmingham.
His ramen bowls are “mostly very good” and “take the essentials seriously”, Jay reckoned. But “what makes the place sing is the quality of the dishes at either end of the meal”: smashed cucumber, squares of pork belly and battered chicken wings all show real attention to detail, while desserts are “a set of cartwheels and backflips”.
Jay Rayner - 2026-01-04
