Rating: 9½/10
The Goring
Telephone 020-7396 9000. Address: Beeston Place, Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1. Open: All week, lunch, 12.30-2.30pm (closed Sat), dinner, 6-10pm. Price: From £50 a head, including wine and service. Wheelchair access (no disabled WC).
When Heraclitus first coined his much-loved catchphrase about change, he cannot have known how prescient he was being. But isn't that always the way with a catchphrase: it sounds great, but who's got the energy to worry about its accuracy? There you are in late 6th century BC Athens, wandering through the olive grove sizing up the 14-year-old male talent ... and then, crash, bang, wallop, from nowhere you blurt out, "Everything is in a constant state of flux."
Next thing you know, everyone's saying it ad nauseam down the agora, and you're under such pressure to find a new one ("You cannot step in the same river twice," was H's follow-up, which is pretty much the same as Flux; indeed, some scholars posit it as the " ... To see you nice!" to Flux's "Nice to see you ...") that you haven't time to analyse whether or not the first one makes any sense.
Some 2,700 years later, I can report that it does. I know this because flux has infiltrated the venerable Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace, where the dining room has been redesigned by HM's nephew, David Linley. Instead of the oak panelling is a softer colour scheme of beige and cream, with champagne-coloured curtains and Swarovski chandeliers that twinkle and change colour according to the amount of natural light, lending the room a pleasingly Christmassy air. It works fine, but the important news is that, decor apart, all else seems precisely as ever.
There's nothing duller than a review that finds no fault, so we took my parents for my birthday outing, my mother being the most demanding person ever to hold cutlery. However, albeit with one eccentric caveat, she declared the meal "faultless", a word she generally reserves for the Queen. As so often, she was right.
To step into the Goring is to enter a cocoon of Edwardian gentility (why the hell have I lapsed into brochure-speak?) in which the horrors of the world cease to register. The service from friendly people in tails is as good as you'll find, the wine list is superb and weirdly reasonable, the menu resists any passing fads, and the food reminds you that traditional, unfussy British cooking of the highest calibre takes a lot of beating.
There is only a set menu at dinner, at £37.50 for two courses and £44 for three, and from this two of us started with whitebait - not the usual scrawny, tasteless little sods, but big, plump, crunchy chaps, which my wife lyrically observed "give off little bursts of ocean with every bite", served with homemade tartare sauce. My game consommé was so good I ate it like someone with adequate table manners to savour every drop. My father backed the winner, however, a quite brilliant glazed lobster omelette that my wife said would make the perfect summer lunch, with chips and salad.
On a cold December night, meanwhile, what would you want for your main but that most regal and warming of meats, venison? Prettily ringed by wild mushrooms and little pommes rissolées, and served with a rich, red wine sauce, this fillet from Balmoral was divine. The others all had calves' liver, served with four crispy rashers and fluffy mash, and here, at last, my mother managed a complaint. "It's too thin," she said, searching in her bag for the callipers she generally carries for such emergencies, but finding none. "Much too thin." Even so, she joined the other two in raving about the dish, later qualifying her praise with the observation that the liver had been rather too thick.
Aptly enough, my bag of presents included a bowl of her own chopped liver. I toyed with asking for some crackers and pickled cucumbers so we could construct our own puddings, just to test the manager's self-control. But nothing would pierce their sang-froid at the Goring (he'd have smiled and said, "Of course, sir. New Green cucumbers, or Heimisha?"), so instead we went the conventional dessert route by sharing a glorious plum crumble and a baked custard tart with nutmeg ice cream.
Apologies again for all the gushing, but, despite the chiffon revolution in the dining room, the Goring remains one of the two or three most pleasurable eating experiences to be found in Britain today, especially at this time of year - and above all for those of us who hate all change, even when it is palpably for the better.
