Park Plaza Hotel, Westminster Bridge, London SE1 (020 7620 7272). Meal for two, including wine and service, £120
It was when the solo diner two tables down from us got out his laptop and began tapping away that I really started feeling sorry for Joel Antunes. He is an accomplished chef, whose cooking at Les Saveurs in the 1990s made people pant and swoon. His arrival back in London is the sort of thing to make people like me, who regard the afternoon as merely dead time between eating opportunities, bounce up and down in their seats with excitement. And yet somehow he has landed in the kind of business hotel which nightly is filled with lonely people staring into their overpriced mojitos, dreaming of the smell of their own beds and wondering how it came to this.
Standing in the shiny, slippery, slinky lobby and squinting to make out the geography through the overconceptualised lighting – pools, splashes, smudges – it quickly became clear that the whole thing had been put together by people who had watched too much Hotel Babylon and assumed it was a design manual, not a kitsch comedy drama. It feels like the kind of place tabloid journalists dressed as sheiks would draw up to every night, ready to get the minor soap stars in room 1823 to admit to an overly fond relationship with Dalmatians. (Note to twitchy lawyers: there is no room 1823, so no Dalmatian-loving minor soap stars have ever slept in it.) I'm not criticising. The whole fake-sheikh thing sounds like a great night out, but is a hotel that might attract them, on a traffic island at the wrong end of Westminster Bridge, really the right place for a chef of this calibre?
I'll answer the question myself. No. It isn't. The restaurant is off to one side of the lobby and, as my companion said, looks like a club class airline lounge: "I feel like I'm waiting for the 21.10 to Miami." She's that kind of girl. There are dark screens and gold shimmering panels which look like those Magic Eye illustrations which, if stared at long enough, reveal a 3D image.
And then there's the food which, for the most part, is good, in a very precise, French way. You will find many of the dishes, or approximations of them, in many other restaurants, but rarely done with this precision or commitment. Look: he even serves tournedos Rossini. The only down points were a lobster Cobb salad which felt overly chucked together for such a louche ingredient – though the seafood was accurately cooked – and a rum baba that wasn't quite lush or syrup-soaked enough. By contrast a gazpacho, with a scoop of tomato sorbet, was vivid and light and fresh and lots of other words that are pressed into service to denote summer.
Better still was a dark, sticky dish of sweetbreads, roast cèpes and beautifully turned roast potatoes with a hunk of long-braised veal cheek served in a Le Creuset-style pan. Admittedly this made it look like a desperate ploy to save on the washing-up, but at least it kept its heat. Another dish of big, butch duck breast was served medium rare, despite my companion asking for it medium; I rather admire the kitchen's obstinacy. It came with sweet cherries, an equally butch sauce and a certain Gallic swagger. A special word, too, for a side of gnocchi soufflé, a cast-iron dish of something light and fluffy and crisp that had us scraping furiously for the best bits on the bottom.
At the end a confection of sweet, crisp pastry leaves with a caramel mousse was much more than just a way to pass the time before our flight. In tribute to Hotel Babylon (which my companion, an actress, almost appeared in) we drank a crisp Provençal rosé, because in that sort of show the characters always do. It was an enjoyable meal, but we couldn't quite shift the sense that it had been enjoyed in the wrong place, that it was a restaurant full of solo diners who were there because they needed to eat and didn't want to go out. As a man who once had to pass Valentine's night alone in the restaurant of the Holiday Inn, Birmingham, I am pleased for these lonely travellers. But I am less pleased for the chef. He deserves better.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
