Then there’s the semiotics and deconstruction of the menu. Elaborate dish descriptions are like the mitigating statements the guilty make before sentencing. The more florid the excuse, the worse the crime you are about to eat. The information “Wherever possible, we use organic and GM-free ingredients” actually means “Wherever possible, we don’t ask — and we’d be grateful if you didn’t either”, while the designation of a home address for fish (Brixham, Poole, Yarmouth) translates as “caught in the northern hemisphere some time this year”.
The lighting in a restaurant is indicative of the type of customer the management hopes to attract. The lower the light source and the dimmer the bulb, the smaller will be the portions and the greater the amount of uncooked vegetables, because they are catering for insecure girls and actors on first dates. (Unless, of course, the restaurant is Italian, in which case it will be lit up like a military airport. Italians like to see and be seen. Insecure girls stay at home making gnocchi — and their mothers miserable.) The other sure guide to the aspirations of a restaurant you’ve never eaten in before is the amount and volume of nappery. If you don’t know whether to eat off it or sleep in it, then you’re in for an expensive night.
But table decoration, lighting and menus are no indication of quality, taste or ability — only of ambition and pretension. What is a pretty good negative tell for quality and taste is if the restaurant relies on something that isn’t edible. Live music, for instance. This comes on a sliding tonic scale, so a piano is just about okay, but a singing pianist isn’t — although he is not as bad as a peripatetic gypsy troupe. If all the waiters get together to sing selections from Norma, then the food will be inedible, cold and flecked with tenor spit. Restaurants where the staff sing Happy Birthday a cappella are fit only for those who aren’t sure how old they are — the very, very young and the toothlessly ancient.
The one indelible rule of eating out is that restaurants are good in inverse proportion to their views. If you’re offered a choice of a table inside or outside, the service will be as remedially forgetful outside as it is attentively efficient in. Something happens to waiters when they don’t have a roof.
Altitude isn’t good for food, either. Which brings us to Windows on the World at the London Hilton, the most famous tall restaurant in Britain. Windows used to have a reputation. It was notorious for its finger buffet of takeaway prostitutes (and I don’t for a moment wish to imply or wink-wink-nose-tap-nudge that the Hilton ran a brothel or condoned the working girls who hung out in its bar). In general, I think food in a bordello is probably marginally worse than with gypsy violinists. I’ve only eaten in a brothel once (stop sniggering). It was a severe and vomitous health risk, and you really needed a condom both ends. But then it was in Addis Ababa.
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But back to the Hilton. The Blonde and I went after visiting the Michelangelo drawings show at the British Museum. Ooh, what that man didn’t know about bottoms! He was pretty good on all sorts of tense masculine muscle, but even after 500 years, his buns are still the peachiest, pertest posteriors of the Renaissance. He was the geezer who put the man in mannerism and took his work home with him: a sort of Tuscan Tom of Finland, but without the leather caps. If you see only one set of exhibitionist buttocks this year, make it Michelangelo’s.
With us at dinner were Katrin, who is the drawings expert from the dealers Colnaghi, and her husband, Christophe, who isn’t. The Hilton’s good-time girls all seem to have disappeared. Personally, I blame the internet. Why schlep up to Park Lane when you can sit at your home page in your dressing gown, pretending to be a 17-year-old French bint with the Sistine Chapel of backsides when, in fact, you’re a 40-year-old Brummie with an arse like an out-of-town shopping centre? Anyway, they have been replaced by the Galvin brothers, who’ve been got in to revamp the food.
The first thing you notice about Windows on the World — apart from the absence of totty — is that it’s a lie. It should be called Windows on Balham and Highgate. But I don’t want to carp. You can see a jolly long way. The problem is that what you see is London. And London isn’t New York or Paris or Rome, or even Addis Ababa. The old girl is best seen at ground level; she’s a city that unfolds rather than offers panoramas. If you’re thinking about eating dinner here, ask for a west-side table — we got a beautifully Turnerish sunset over Richmond.
In the past, the food has always been deeply mediocre at best. The Galvins have a highly successful French restaurant in Marylebone. I think I was the only critic not to be bowled over by it, and I was really hoping to be proved wrong here. Perhaps authentic French food would bring a little bit of Paris to the dull roofs of London.
I started with a Provençal tarte fine with slices of cold cooked tuna. It was well made, but awkward and unrewarding to eat, and reminded me of lunchtime take-outs from Chelsea delicatessens. Lobster bisque was much better: an immaculate flavour with a touch of cognac, but a heavy hand on the cream. The sea scallops and jersey royals, and seared foie gras, were better again, but only because the ingredients were pretty perfect.
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For main course, a risotto of morels, peas, broad beans and summer truffles was like a paella — what is the point of summer truffles, apart from a fiver on the bill? — and, contrarily, the paella with monkfish, shrimp, mussels and saffron wasn’t enough like a paella. The ingredients hadn’t come together with blue-collar gusto. Spiced duck with endive, turnips and sherry vinegar was a vivid, cacophonous chew, like eating the encore of a music-hall act.
Puddings were from that international carte of disappointing desserts for people who say: “No, just the bill, please.” The French cheese trolley was the only thing that was higher than the view — apart from the prices, of course. Starters are about £12 and mains £24. This is never going to be about value.
Overall, the menu suffers from being a lounge lizard of smarmy sophistication, and that oxymoron “International fine dining”. All the old naffness and hushed suavity of grand hotel dining rooms still lurks. Which is a shame, because this kitchen doesn’t lack skill. It’s just that the menu keeps staring out of the window. What Windows really needs is curtains.
WINDOWS ON THE WORLD
3 stars
28th floor, London Hilton on Park Lane, 22 Park Lane, W1; 020 7208 4021
Lunch, Sun-Fri, noon-2.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Thu, 6pm-10.30pm, Fri-Sat, 6pm-11pm
5 stars Presidential suite
4 stars Room with a view
3 stars Junior suite
2 stars Box room
1 star No room at the inn