Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, London W1 (020 7317 6531). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £220
Of all the dirty food acts I have committed – that dribbling sausage I ate from the late-night cart in Leicester Square, a solo dinner at Frankie and Bennys’, a Greggs pasty which I quietly enjoyed – this feels like the very worst. I am going for dinner in an establishment I am meant to be boycotting. Recently the Sultan of Brunei introduced sharia law, including the stoning to death of homosexuals. As he owns the Dorchester Hotel, I should not be darkening its door. But I’ve always believed that the best way to deal with bigotry is to laugh in its face. And oh my, is there a lot to laugh at about the Dorchester. And it’s not just the women in the mink bomber jackets with the face lifts so tight the classic Brazilian risks becoming a Van Dyke moustache.
What’s most amusing is that of all the great London hotels, the Dorchester has always been the campest. The wide corridor of a lobby is a riot of soft furnishings and tassels and cushions so plump you could fake a pregnancy with them. It is a masterclass in try-too-hard fabulous. For many years the counterfeit jewel in this paste crown was the Dorchester Grill, a room off to the side where the walls were decorated with 12ft murals of big-thighed chaps in kilts tossing things hither and yon. The carpet was a massive tartan print and the banquettes were studded lumps of red brocade. Stereotyping queer culture as one thing or another is almost as stupid as trying to ban it. But let’s just say it was ironic for an apparently homophobic sultan to own a room like this.
For years talented chefs came and went from here, knocking out smart dishes that simply couldn’t compete with the walls. It didn’t matter what those poor cooks did. Everyone came out muttering about the kilts. So now Alain Ducasse (who already runs the dour Michelin three-star down the hall) has taken control, and the room has had a makeover. And yes, the murals have gone. But oh my! What they’ve put in their place! It takes an awful lot of money to make a room look this cheap. It’s a space that hasn’t been allowed to hear the words: “That will do.” It’s all mirrors and gilding and desperation. The caramel-coloured leather banquettes even have broad fold-down armrests of the sort you’d find in a Mercedes S Class, so you don’t have to touch your companion. It looks like the inside of a little girl’s plastic music box.
To view all this you must first negotiate the sharp-creased and -heeled automatons on the desk in the corridor outside who find our request to wait at the bar difficult to comprehend. It turns out you have to ask just the three times. Through the doors and we are confronted by a wall stacked with five figures’ worth of shiny, pink-tinted copperware. A couple of shelves are taken up with jelly moulds, and it is those which sums up what’s going on here. There may be battalions of impeccably French staff both front and back of house doing their best to patronise the hell out of you. But when you drill down on the menu it’s what the faded gentry used to call high tea. It’s nursery food at stupid prices. Come on, Nanny: safety-pin my XXXL nappy in place and bring me din-dins.
You can call breaded fingers of lemon sole “goujonettes” if you really like, but that doesn’t stop them looking like something out of a freezer bag from Iceland, and it certainly doesn’t justify a £17 price tag. As for the rest, there’s no doubting the technique. There are people in that kitchen who doubtless could recite pages of Larousse Gastronomique at you like it was the litany. But all that technique is then pressed into the service of the dull and lifeless. A puck of cheese soufflé in a cheese sauce has a fine, soft texture, but eats like a dish you would get spooned into your mouth by someone else when you’re feeling poorly.
A lobster bisque makes its point through udder-squirts of cream. Pâté en croûte is a dense cramming-together of blitzed animal between two slivers of pressed pastry, all served far too cold. Main courses are prime ingredients at excruciating prices. A beef fillet for £46 comes with a Yorkshire pudding which isn’t as good as those I make, alongside a dry bit of sawn-through marrowbone topped with breadcrumbs. Most odd is two slices of pork belly, cooked for seven hours before being grilled, in a sticky glaze that smells lightly of Marmite. The fat yields, but the meat is hard, which is a remarkable achievement for something that’s apparently been cooked for so long. A veal chop escapes with its virtue.
If there’s a point to coming here it’s dessert – especially a pistachio soufflé with a liquid salted-caramel centre from its “soufflé list”. But again, while I can admire the technique I can’t admire the £14 price tag. Worryingly, lemon tart is described as being made “our way”, which predictably means it’s not a tart at all but a dome of meringue filled with lemon curd. If only they would do it someone else’s way.
Thank God for the company I kept that night, for there is something utterly joyless about this place. It’s that killer combination of smugness and dreariness; it’s the restaurant equivalent of the office bore. Often I’m asked why I bother visiting restaurants like this where the bill swiftly reaches enough to buy the cuff on a mink bomber jacket. Partly it’s rubbernecking. I do love watching the oblivious rich in surroundings of acute bad taste masquerading as good. But it’s also that these restaurants attempt to fool people into thinking they are worth it if only they could save up. It’s useful to know that they are not.
So yes, you can hate the Dorchester Grill on principle. You can avoid the whole damn hotel on the grounds that its knuckle-dragging owner thinks stoning strangers to death is a reasonable response to their sexual orientation. But I think it helps to know that you can also hate it on its own terms; that the price tag will not buy you bliss or, as the best restaurants do, a moment suspended in time. It will simply buy you the sense that some people have too much money and others know how to take it off them.
Jay’s news bites
■ Brasserie Chavot on London’s Conduit Street is a hotel restaurant which, courtesy of separate entrances, pretends not to be. Only the trip to the loos through the bowels of the Westbury Hotel gives it away. What matters is Eric Chavot’s food. He brings generosity to classic paysanne dishes: his take on choucroute is shamelessly piggy, with sauerkraut almost an after-thought (brasseriechavot.com).
■ Stock-cube botherer Marco Pierre White may seem at times to have squandered his reputation but there’s no doubting his impact, much of it built by his cookbook White Heat, with chef-as-rockstar photos by the late Bob Carlos Clarke. Its 25th anniversary is being marked by a new edition out in February (marco pierrewhite.org).
■ Finally the British are cutting down on meat. A YouGov survey for the Eating Better Alliance found that 20% of people are eating less animal protein for financial reasons or because of health or welfare issues. Another 35% are considering it. Note: the Eating Better Alliance was specifically set up in 2013 to encourage less meat eating (eating-better.org).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
