Fronting on Park Lane, a classic brasserie-style operation, where the attractions of good Gallic food and service are overwhelmed by depressing design and high prices.
Is it deliberate that hotels often get things so desperately wrong? Do they just not understand the concept of ‘restaurant’? Have any of the people who commission new hotel-restaurants every actually eaten out for pleasure? So high is the ‘turkey-ratio’ evident in the current London hotel-restaurant boom that these questions must be asked.
Look at the disasters visited on Park Lane in recent times. The atmosphere-free horror which is Theo Randall at the Intercontinental, for example, or the high Caledonian camp imposed – why? – on the once-majestic Dorchester Grill. These examples have one thing in common: huge amounts of money and resources wasted to create interiors which hinder rather than help digestion.
It’s almost impossible to count the ways in which the Grosvenor House’s new ‘informal’ eatery is wrong. The idea – and a perfectly good one – was to create a proper French brasserie. The space available here is enormous and lofty – two features rare in London – and there is even a great place glass frontage (even if it borders Park Lane, rather than any sort of ‘Waters’). A simple trip on the Eurostar would have given the designers some hints as to how to make a proper grand Gallic brasseries, even one attached to a hotel (as at the Lutétia).
What they’ve ended up with here – at huge expense, we assume – is a bog-standard hotel dining room jazzed up (or, rather, not) with some back office bod’s idea of brasserie flourishes, such as the occasional Art Nouveau chandelier, which is about as close to ‘electricity’ as the room ever gets. This lack of inspiration – also evident in the appallingly uncompelling and difficult-to-read menu presentation – is both mind-boggling and spirit-numbing. Yet, if they’d just ‘gone for it’ a bit – perhaps in the Coupole-like style of Bayswater’s Café Anglais – they could have had something truly spectacular.
So, a great opportunity missed, and Londoners are presented with a classically dull hotel dining room which no sane non-resident would ever want to seek out. Which is all a crying shame. Prices are high, but the standards of both the SW-French cuisine (from head chef Ollie Couillard) and of the mainly Gallic service are consistently high.
