Rocco Forte’s mission to re-establish his family name as a force in hotels goes from strength to strength. He has snapped up some great continental properties, and opened top-level newcomers in British cities that previously had none: in Manchester or Cardiff, chez Rocco is the best place to stay. Not, however, the top place to eat. As consistently as his hotels have succeeded, their glossy modern restaurants have been an almost total disappointment.
Given the patron’s ‘DNA’, our expectations of his Mayfair hotel’s newly revamped dining room were rather limited. Our initial impressions were indeed muted: the aim is clearly old-fashioned clubbiness, but the result is somewhere between austere and nondescript. The menu mixes classic grills with fancier creations and the former – we avoided the latter – were perfectly OK. The trouble is that, even in Mayfair, a perfectly OK hotel meal shouldn’t set you back nearly £100 a head.
If the service were poor, the place could easily be a disaster. Thankfully, the super-affable retainers – presided over by ex-Savoy Grill maître d’ Angelo Maresca – somewhat save the day, and inject some much-needed brio.
Ironically, the previous Browns restaurant (called 1837) was – barring service – notably better in every way. Such backwards progress must be a rarity, right? Sadly no. Recent history is littered with examples of London’s traditional grand hotel restaurants’ fatuous attempts to get ‘with it’, with results which have often been little short of disastrous.
The most recent fiasco is the ‘new’ Dorchester Grill, which has trashed a truly excellent old-fashioned formula for a laughably poor ‘modern’ one. This act of change for change’s sake was quite rightly decried by Michael Winner – a man who knows a bit about grand hotels – as ‘vandalism’: precisely the term we had used in the review on these pages.
The previous act of gross vandalism was the Ramsification of the Connaught. Admittedly there was an argument that this century-old dining room did need freshening up. There was, however, no excuse for trashing its unique ancien régime formula – one American magazine called this ‘the last great French restaurant in the world’ – and replacing it with one verging on modern mediocrity.
Even at Claridge’s – where Gordon Ramsay’s name being nailed above the door has brought in the crowds – standards, as recorded in our annual survey, have actually declined from the days when the restaurant was a real part of a slightly batty, but still rather wonderful, truly English institution.
So have there been any examples of great leaps forward? Not really: the best results – such as Ramsay’s take-over at the Savoy Grill – have at best done no great harm (but even then there’s a slight feeling that a great institution has been replaced by a reasonably good restaurant).
In fact it’s probably no coincidence that the only really successful grand traditional restaurant transformation of recent times has been implemented by the Goring dynasty, at their eponymous hotel near Victoria station. Here the guiding principle – as always – was evolution, not revolution, and the evolved restaurant (as recently reviewed here) is full to bursting.
