The Bentley Hotel
27-33 Harrington Gardens, SW7 (020-7244 5555)
A restaurant cannot be all things to all punters and last week’s gushing review of Sardo Canale, while leading most of you towards some of the best Italian food you had eaten in years, was felt by a couple of readers to have sown seed on stony ground. Or at least to have sown bums on stony seats.
“Dear Mr Coren,” wrote Arnold Wisbeech of Southgate, “Thank you for your recommendation of Sardo Canale. My wife and I enjoyed a most pleasurable meal there last night. The food and service were excellent and, most importantly, it was easy to park and they let us smoke. But I feel I must complain about the hardness of the chairs. It may be all right for you restaurant critics, with your great, fat, well-fed arses, to perch for two hours on a cushionless chair of some previously unknown tropical hardwood, so hard that it must have been selectively cultivated for the building of bomb shelters. But I will be 66 years old in a fortnight and I no longer have any fat on my bottom. In fact, I no longer have a bottom to speak of at all. As I write this, standing up, 16 hours after the event, I still have pins and needles in my behind. In future, please spare a thought for the bony-bottomed in your reviews.”
Old people, eh? If it’s not the hardness of the chairs then it’s “these dashed wooden floors that make a dining room so noisy” or “all those stairs to the loo” or “food that had to be cut up and chewed before
swallowing”. Well, I hesitate to suggest that there comes a point in every man’s life when one just has to accept defeat and sign up for meals on wheels, so I shall do exactly as you ask, Mr Wisbeech.
So in the first of what may be a series of restaurant reviews that foreground scofferies ideal for the depleted of buttock, I intend to focus upon 1880 at The Bentley in South Kensington, a new hotel built entirely out of gold, for that Saudi-ex-pat-meets-Eurotrash-pimp-with-a-view-to-buying-some-young-Filipina-ladies look.
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Though determinedly old school in its pomp and in its approach to bum comfort, 1880 has a habit that will infuriate the elderly and set-in-their-ways. For it is one of those places that demand a credit-card number with your booking, which is a cheap, vulgar, unwelcoming habit. If I book at Gordon Ramsay for six people four months in advance, then OK. Top-end restaurants running to a tight margin cannot afford big table peak-time no-shows. But at a place nobody has heard of, for two people booking less than 24 hours in advance, it is just rude. It is also arrogant, smug and ugly. And it is a pain for critics, because I can’t register a credit card every time I invent an alias. Which is why I always make up the credit-card number, and recommend you do the same.
Secondly, it was miserable to arrive at such a grand place on a Saturday night and find the doors shut and no doorman inside or out. After pushing and pulling at various doors until one finally yielded, in a way that would embarrass and infuriate the buttockless and feeble-jointed generation at which the 1880 sets its cap, I found myself inside a glistering music box of a lobby. A staff member sauntered over to ask what I wanted. I said the restaurant. So he pointed to the stairs. Pointed. Down we went, clicking on the marble like museum cleaners. At the bottom was an unmanned reception desk in front of a curtain, through which a sprauncy dining room could be glimpsed, glinting and bustling like Zsa Zsa Gabor. Ungreeted for some seconds, we finally breached the curtain, where we were noticed and brought back to be signed in.
Thereafter, things looked up. There was a deep, deep carpet with a nice green and pink floral design (like in my late paternal grandparents’ St John’s Wood flat, if you knew it), which would have sucked up all the noise very efficiently, if there had been any. But the three or four populated tables were generating very few decibels, either out of respect for the luxy environment or because they couldn’t.
And, ooh, those chairs. Like thrones they were. Even the arms were cushioned. My bum sank in and never wanted to leave. In the land of the arseless, the averagely-bummed man is king, I thought.
Best of all, the food was of the type that you do not have to cut up and chew before eating. I’d eaten the work of Andrew Turner before, at 1837 in Mayfair, and recalled long crockery, pretty colours, jolly on-plate architecture, textures more than flavours, and a sense, above all, of delicacy.
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To complement the à la carte, Turner’s menu offers “grazing menus” of five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten courses, which “create a unique dining experience”. One that is available, of course, in most restaurants.
I had the niner, which, with a frog-leg amuse-bouche and eventual petits fours, came to 11 in the end. It began, amphibian amputations aside, with a clam soup aux pistou (why the superfluous “x”?), which was a bit of a damp squib, a fishy consommé with cubed vegetables. Not bad, but disconcertingly unluxurious. With my arse and ears so gently cosseted, my tongue wanted in on the act with a fawning little truffled velouté or something.
Exquisite gravadlax rolled around a cylinder of potato salad was a highlight, as was a fat slab of foie gras, which glistened dark gold from the pan but wobbled with a lovely rareness. The oval plate had bright yellow blobs of mango coulis round the perimeter like security guards at a football match. Then a roasted scallop sat on some peas and white sultanas in the little paddling pool at the centre of one of those silly sombrero-type plates, as did, in the next course, a piece of overcooked halibut with darling little green-pea spaetzle. The lamb cutlet was also tough: though served quite rare, it was uncuttable, unchewable and tasteless. But as I’d already had six courses I didn’t mind too much, and was happy with two accompanying niblets of excellent sweetbread and a lush little strip of confit breast. If some of the centrepieces were
disappointing, Turner’s sauces, most notably a perigourdine and a lie de vin, were brilliant, quite irreproachable. The garnish was sometimes fussy, but then so are old people with bony bums.
Service was friendly and well-timed, which is tricky with this many courses. And in such a long meal it was a blessing to have my arse so well catered for by the comfiness of the chair. This enabled me to enjoy a pretty decent cheeseboard (though the epoisse looked distressingly dry in its sad
little box) and perfect little puddings that included a tiny Cornetto and a corking brandy snap.
My only real complaint relates to the beginning of the meal: lose the bread trolley. I was offered five or six different kinds of bread, including a vast olive muffin and a mushroom, cheese and ham thing that was all but a calzone. Offer this stodge to people before dinner and they’ll eat it. And then they’ll grind to a halt long before I did. Those great loaves have no use in a restaurant of this kind, except possibly to slip under one’s ageing rump if the seats are too hard. Which, as I have been at pains to explain, they are not.
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Food: 7
Service: 6
Bum comfort: 9
Score: 7.33
Price: from £40 per head for five courses to £58 per head for ten.
Brunello
Baglioni Hotel, 60 Hyde Park Gate, London SW7 (020-7368 5900)
Another mostly gold dining room in a new hotel with chairs so soft your bum will wink cheekily after dinner and suggest getting a room.
The Gay Hussar
2 Greek Street, W1 (020-7437 0973)
The rich Hungarian food goes straight to your posterior, which is just as well, because it will have sunk so deep in the rich velvet banquette that that is the only way you will find it.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere nice we can haul our arses to together.