If you decide to visit the Grill Room at London's Dorchester Hotel, you better have a strong stomach. This has nothing to do with the food, which is why you should go, and everything to do with the decor, which is perhaps why you shouldn't. The Grill used to be one of London's most traditional restaurants, where men who dreamed of nursey went for pieces of meat garnished with woody stalks of watercress. A year or two back they closed it for a renovation. As I understand it, the concept meeting went like this. What do we serve? Scottish smoked salmon and beef. Right then, a Scottish theme it is. Then they got a designer whose vision of Scottishness was part Disney, part shortbread-biscuit box, part Briga-bloody-doon by way of Banksy.
The yellow ochre walls are painted with 20ft murals of muscular men in tartan. The seats are upholstered in a parody of tartan, which carries on to the carpet. Camp doesn't do it. It is a parody of camp, it is camp on steroids. It is an expression of the gay aesthetic as realised by the sort of straight bloke who insists that some of his best friends are gay.
What I do not understand is why the management never said: 'No! Stop!' They would have had ample opportunity. There was the moment when they saw the conceptual drawings or when they were shown the swags of material, or when the artists started drawing their big strapping jocks up on the walls. There was even the moment when the room was finished and, having spent a rumoured £1m, they could have said: 'Jesus, this is a disaster. We will be the laughing stock of London. Seal the doors. Swear everyone to secrecy. Bring in the flame throwers and let's start again.'
Curiously, while they displayed criminal incompetence in the matter of interior design, they discovered good taste when it came to the appointment of the current chef, Aiden Byrne. I first ate Byrne's food about a year ago, when he was at Danesfield House near Marlow, where I admired the technique if not the imagination. Byrne was formerly Tom Aikens's head chef, and the mark of his mentor - sauces smeared across the plate, multi-texture riffs on ingredients - was everywhere. Now he has found his own style and, unlike the decor, it's mature and well thought out. He is clearly intrigued by the modernist tropes of foams and jellies, but uses them only where they make sense. Of course £160 for two is a pile of money, but there are many places in London where you can spend this sort of cash, and many are less than reliable. This, however, was a beautifully consistent meal.
It is, of course, asparagus and morel season, and here they were in a starter which combined them, along with a soft-boiled egg and a little toast, in a grand satisfying plateful: here a perfect spear wrapped in bacon, there a little asparagus mayonnaise, some morels, and on the side a shot glass of a creamy asparagus liquor with, at the bottom, a potent mushroom duxelles. There was a lot of stuff going on, but it ate as one idea. Likewise another starter of seared scallops sprinkled with fennel pollen. They came on a cauliflower puree with a dollop of sherry jelly, some plump raisins and a little dill sauce. It is a complicated read but a simple eat, with touches like the jelly and the dill becoming on the tongue like little dashes of bright colour in a painting.
He achieved something similar with the main courses, introducing lots of things on to the plate, all of which had a reason to be there. With sea bass came celeriac in a number of ways and, most thrillingly, little savoury bonbons of snails wrapped in chicken mousse and sprinkled with cep powder. This was like greeting an old friend. They were an invention of the mercurial chef Richard Neat for whom Byrne once worked, and it was a pleasure to see them again. Another dish of pigeon delivered various riffs on the bird alongside foie gras: a little sausage made with its offal; creamy fondants of the same, with foie; a teeny-weeny braised wing; the breast cooked sous vide to a sublime tenderness; and a leg, boned out, re-stuffed with a mixture of pigeon and liver, the whole then confited, wrapped in strands of potato and deep fried. Yes, an absurd amount of work but to fabulous effect.
Desserts - one of banana and peanuts, another of pear, cinnamon and spiced bread - were less focused, but honour was saved by both a pre-dessert of passion-fruit jelly, raspberry sorbet and lime foam, and petits fours, including a miniature and impeccable rum baba. Service is efficient and the wine list, although weighed down with usual high-end silliness, starts with 30 wines under £30. But what really matters here is what's on the plate. If you do go, take my advice: enjoy the food, and whatever you do, don't look up.
