Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa gasped when he stepped inside the extravagant new Mandarin Oriental Mayfair in Hanover Square. Sadly its headline restaurant, from Seoul-born, Las Vegas-based celeb chef Akira Back, had the opposite effect – “its conceptual lodestar is nothing so much as the safe, cosseting Anywheresville of international luxury culture”.
The sprawling interior has “the taupe, stone and timber colour palette of an especially grand Apple Store”, while the food is “a mixture of Japanese, Korean and high-low American fusion — the kind of thing that you can imagine slowly warming in the sunshine next to a Mykonos pool cabana”.
Some of it sounded half-way decent. Gochujang bibimbap donburi was “highly comforting”, while the chef’s signature tuna pizza was “compelling, if odd” – “a circular cracker, layered over with ‘umami aioli’, translucent scrims of sashimi and a haunting blast of truffle oil… the sort of thing a degenerate chef might pile onto a Ryvita after service.” All in all, though, “this is the 24th outpost of a global empire that’s more about pacifying high-net-worth travellers than it is about enriching a local food culture”.
Jimi enquired whether the chef was present. He wasn’t. “Barely two weeks into the life of his latest outpost, Back had not fancied hanging around. I cannot say that I blame him.”
Jimi Famurewa - 2024-06-30
