The Stafford Hotel, 16-18 St James's Place, London SW1
020 74930111
Meal for two, including wine and service, £150
People don't go to the Lyttelton Restaurant of the Stafford Hotel in London's St James's for dinner. They go there to be interred. It is a deathly place of over-stuffed cushions and over-varnished woodwork – the sort of joint that would feature in a Le Carré novel as the meeting point for dodgy oligarchs and London's investment bankers looking to asset-strip a small nation. As we were led through the restaurant space, little more than a gussied-up lounge, I imagined the glassy-eyed diners muttering "Save yourself!" under their breath. Our table was located up a flight of steps in a small wood-lined box of a side room. Hurrah. Our very own coffin. Quite so, for the Stafford is also where bank accounts go to die.
We went because it is grouse season and I had been told good things about the way the bird is prepared here, by a newly arrived chef who used to be at Richard Corrigan's great seafood restaurant Bentley's. This was true: the grouse was the one good thing we ate – well hung, the breasts and legs taken off the carcass and served the right shade of pink, the offal spread on toast. There were game chips, a good gravy and a well-made bread sauce. All was as it should be – and rightly so, given the price tag. At £36 the bird shouldn't merely have been correctly garnished, it should have come to our table before dinner and thrown in a few jokes and a dance.
It is not merely the mediocrity of the rest of the cooking that grates, or the opportunistic pricing – people who willingly come to a place like this simply don't care – but the shameless attempts to separate you from your cash. There were the aggressively enthusiastic and relentless invitations at top and bottom of the meal to order champagne, martinis and cognac. There was also the outrageous pricing on the wine list. I took one look at it, saw digits swim before my eyes, handed it to my companion and went to the loo. He could find nothing under £40 a bottle and, asking the sommelier for help in the search, had been offered something at £48. He'd given up the pursuit of the affordable and ordered it. I called the list back and found a Kiwi Pinot Noir at £35. We were halfway through our starters when the waiter returned to say they were out of that wine. What a surprise. Instead he offered a Chilean cabernet at £31 – the cheapest bottle on the list. There's no excuse for it.
The menu is an uneasy mix of dull classics – smoked salmon, carved ham, dressed crab – and worryingly creative flourishes. One of these, a starter listed as snails and crubeens, which should be little fritters of gooey braised pig's trotter, was a salty, sticky, unpleasant mess of chewy snails and flavourless deep-fried cubes. "This is rather nasty," my companion said sadly. He was right. A mulligatawny soup, unlike me, was, unlike me, thin, insubstantial and lacking in depth. Its only virtue was the volume of white crabmeat that had been dumped in it.
Next, the creditable grouse and a dismal plate of suckling pig three ways. One of these three ways was as black pudding, which is intriguing. For various legal reasons it's almost impossible to get fresh pig's blood in this country; the vast majority of black pudding in the UK is made from powders imported from Denmark and the Netherlands, where pig-welfare standards are lower. I'm fascinated as to how they found a supply of blood specifically from a suckling pig. There was a small round of pig ballotine, a rather ordinary fritter. And no crackling. Yup. None. There is no point to a suckling-pig dish without a bit of skin. Then again it's a fitting metaphor for the Stafford's restaurant, because there's little point to that either.
Desserts were dull and at best workmanlike. A Bakewell tart made with marmalade tasted of marmalade not at all and was served with a fridge-cold dish of thick custard. A lemon posset was fine on flavour, but slightly overset. We declined the offers of coffee. We declined the offers of cognac. We declined everything because we'd already had a bellyful and so moved swiftly on to what we now knew would be the very best part of our evening at the Stafford Hotel: leaving it.
