Galvin at Windows, Hilton Hotel, 22 Park Lane, London W1 (020 7208 4021)
Breakfast for two: £45
Breakfast, like taxidermy and foreplay, is a simple idea, but very hard to get right. There is nowhere for the kitchen to hide at breakfast. At lunch or dinner they can divert attention with curious flavour combinations and elaborate saucing. They can pelt you with amuse-bouches and pre-desserts, hose you down with veloutes and coulis. At breakfast - by which I mean a proper breakfast of the kind no one needs - there are only two things that matter: ingredients and generosity. Come up wanting on either of these, and the whole enterprise - the grand indulgence of it, the unnecessary glutton-heap of calories - will be a failure.
Recently, the restaurant at the top of the Hilton Hotel on London's Hyde Park Corner announced it would be serving breakfast. This was promising news. Earlier this year, Windows on the 28th floor of the hotel was taken over by the Galvin brothers, Chris and Jeff, who made such a splash last year when they opened Galvin on Baker Street, their snazzy take on the French bistro. For years, Windows had been renowned for the clientele, which is to say you couldn't see the fantastic view over London for the sort of women who invoice their companions at the end of the evening. The arrival of the Galvins at Windows promised some unforced Gallic class and, while the menu is more complex than at the sibling on Baker Street and, golly, quite a lot more expensive, that's what they have delivered. I have eaten dinner there twice - butch lobster bisque, asparagus with the best hollandaise I've ever come across, exemplary pigeon and lamb - and the combination of the assured service and the view has made it a worthy addition to London's restaurant scene. Every city should have a restaurant with a fantastic view.
I was, therefore, excited by the notion of breakfast here in the clouds, and on a sparkling summer's morning the setting didn't disappoint. 'Look at that,' my companion said, pointing at the Crystal Palace television mast, shimmering through the haze, 'you can even see Paris.' It was the best joke of the morning, because all the rest were of the bitter kind. I can only assume the Galvin boys are so knackered by the effort of running two restaurants at once that they don't have the wherewithal to get breakfast right. Which, at £23 for the continental and £26 for the full English, they really should.
The sloppiness of the enterprise is summed up by the strand of cellophane that still clung to the slice of herb butter with my grilled kipper. The undyed kipper itself was nice enough, if on the small side - a deep cure, a light smokiness - but leaving the wrapper on the plate was unforgivable. Before I got to the kipper there was the viennoiserie, which was a lovely name for a basket of lacklustre pastries. The croissant, pain au chocolat and small muffins and tarts were dry and crumbly, as if they had been made many hours ago. At this point one forgets about the view - save for gloomily wondering whether to chuck yourself off and become a part of it - and thinks only about price. I asked if the pastries had been made by the restaurant. I was told they had been made by the hotel, which I took to mean somewhere on one of the other 27 floors, but not here.
The biggest disappointment was the full English. Here's where sourcing is everything. It has to be the best bloody sausage in Christendom; the best bacon, the best black pudding. You should want to fall to your knees on the Hilton shag pile gasping, 'Oh piggy, for this sacrifice I salute you. It was not in vain.' Or something. But this was ho-hum. Not bad, exactly, just a masterclass in mediocre. Sauteed potatoes had not been fried off to the necessary luscious crispness, and the black pudding was on more than nodding terms with underdone. Where that dish failed the sourcing test, the breakfast buffet failed the generosity test: a couple of baskets of those dreaded pastries, a platter of ham and one of smoked salmon, two kinds of fruit and just the one cereal. It looked like it had been compiled by an anally retentive, bean-counting food and beverage manager.
Service managed to be attentive without, curiously, being effective. Refills of coffee and milk took an age to arrive, and why, in God's name, did we have to ask for butter? At breakfast? Some of you, I know, will scowl at the notion of £60 for two for this; will argue that we got all we deserved. But done well, breakfast removes the need not just for lunch but for dinner, too. And breakfast the next day. Done right it may just be the most cost-efficient meal available in a London hotel restaurant. But not, sadly, at Galvin at Windows.
