Telephone: 020-7499 0888
Address: Four Seasons Hotel, Hamilton Place, Park Lane,London W1
Price: Around £120 fortwo (with wine).
Open: All week, lunch, 12 noon-2.30pm; dinner, 6-11pm (Sun, 6.30-10.30pm)
Disabled access
Dress code (smart/casual)
It's not only in Monopoly that landing on a hotel means disaster. Most of them resemble lunatic asylums (except there it's the patients who wear the uniforms) and, the moment you enter their walls, insanity reigns supreme. The electronic swing doors turn out to be the only courteous and efficient employees in the place - and the only ones who don't expect a tip. After receiving the traditional greeting from reception (that is, being ignored by three Barbie dolls in gingham, all refusing in perfect synchronicity to look up from their computers), you soon discover that "24-hour room service" means it takes 24 hours to get served. And that every time you leave your room, someone will sneak in, fold the end of your lavatory roll into a neat triangle, and then leave again. And that cleaning ladies will interpret the words "Do Not Disturb" hung outside your room to mean "Just walk through the sodding door without knocking, even though the guest inside is stark naked and at stool".
Then there's the "full English breakfast", a lardy concoction that's only ever eaten in hotels because it's already included on the bill (and, for those who indulge in it regularly, the only "snap, crackle and pop" they'll hear is the sound of their chairs collapsing under the weight). Hotel food is frequently so dire that only a captive audience would consent to eat it, but there are some notable exceptions. Which brings me to Lanes Restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel on Park Lane, London. I first ate here a decade ago (before it was called Lanes), when a star duo was in charge: Ramon Pajares as manager and Jean-Christophe Novelli as head chef. Nowadays, the cuisine is in the equally capable hands of executive chef Bernhard Mayer and restaurant chef Shaun Whatling, whose eclectic menus combine Italian and Oriental influences (a sort of I-Thai), and achieve fusion without confusion.
The restaurant's interior design is striking, with chairs that resemble a cross between a 1950s Cadillac and a 1920s Rolls-Royce: huge, purple-upholstered, leather-sprung and quilted. Once seated, I ordered curried pumpkin soup with feta-cheese fritters, which was as rich and as thick as Prince Andrew, and faintly Singaporean in its fennelly liquorice lickerousness. As with many of the soups here, the liquor is served separately and poured over the main ingredients at the table. It's the Mongolian hotpot principle, ensuring that the whole dish tastes absolutely fresh. My guest's first course was equally intriguing: a lobster and coconut soup with prawn tempura and lemongrass, served with a classic fresh soup liquor (an authentic soupe de poisson of extraordinary intensity, as though the contents of the entire fish market at Nice had been squeezed through muslin).
My main course was a complex masterpiece of tastes, a star anise-glazed supreme of guinea fowl with ponzu vinaigrette and mandarin sticky rice that wasn't actually sticky at all, but was wondrously infused with saffron - a truly sublime construction. As was my companion's pan-fried fillet of John Dory with steamed wontons and smoked paprika broth, accompanied by braised red cabbage. The menu contains several low-calorie alternatives,too, but sod it - a gastro-loger who thinks of calories is like a prostitute who looks at her watch.
My guest (a brilliant harpist) and I were discussing the possibility of using a Celtic harp as a cheese cutter when the corpse of milk arrived. Here, alas, the evening struck its one false note, because if (as Brillat-Savarin once said) a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with one eye, then this poor woman was positively blind. With Paxton & Whitfield just down the road, there really was no excuse for the bland, pasteurised selection we were offered, so we were both relieved when the waiter asked, "Would you like to see the exotic dessert trolley?" We did, and although the trolley itself wasn't particularly exotic, many of the desserts were, notably a coconut soufflé with Malibu liqueur, surely the Platonic ideal form of all those imperfect coconut macaroons from my childhood.
OK, this is Park Lane, so it's not cheap, but the meal was worth every penny of the Guardian's money. In fact, the entire hotel is magnificent. General manager John Stauss and his team run it in the traditional way, giving a personal service that's now depressingly hard to find. To show you what I mean, I received a letter not so long ago from a reader: Marjorie White told me that her son and his family had taken her for a birthday dinner at the Four Seasons, and when her son recently returned alone to the hotel he was astonished that the waiter remembered his mother, and asked where she was. The son told the waiter that she couldn't be there because she was recovering from a serious operation, and next day she received a box of Four Seasons choccies in her ward. That is service above and beyond the call of duty, and illustrates why Mr Stauss's hotel and staff are held in such high regard.
