Top Tables: There's grit in the oyster, but London has a classy new restaurant in the form of Kerridge's Bar & Grill
There are certain rooms in London that lift my heart the moment I walk into them: The Royal Festival Hall, the Mark Rothko gallery at Tate Modern and the Lalique-clad Fumoir bar at Claridge’s are a few that come to mind. Sometimes, however, bad things happen to good spaces. Terrible, unspeakable things.
The Criterion Brasserie in Piccadilly Circus, with its opulent glistering ceiling, is one of the most beautiful interiors in London. Numerous restaurateurs have tried their luck at firing up its neo-Byzantine engine, but it still hasn’t been worth a look since the Eighties. Today it is occupied by a pedestrian Italian wannabe-chain operation with fake plants obscuring Thomas Verity’s 19th-century gold mosaic. Eating there would be the equivalent of watching Joan Crawford at the tail end of her career in Trog, but infinitely less amusing.
The main restaurant space at the Corinthia Hotel London is another room that has deserved more from life. It was the grandest space in the building when the hotel opened in 2011, bringing new energy to an overlooked part of the Embankment next to Whitehall Gardens – one of the prettiest green spaces on the Thames. The fabulously grand ceiling heights at Massimo, as it was then, seemed standard in the most lavish new hotel in the city. Here was a place offering one “wow” moment after another.
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With an eye to fashioning a destination dining room, The David Collins Studio (with Collins still alive and running the ship) created an Italianate fantasy with striped columns and vast glass orb chandeliers. It was one of the most beautiful restaurants in Europe. But it just never really… happened.
Chef Massimo Riccioli turned out decent enough seafood, but nothing inspired a scene. It was the restaurant that no one was talking about. I went a couple of times for dinner, and once for a party, but was always more interested in what chef Garry Hollihead was doing with the Northall on the other side of the lobby, where you could get the best steak tartare in town and Damian Allsop’s freeze-dried raspberries dipped in chocolate.
Massimo bit the dust this summer, to be replaced by one of the autumn’s big openings – Kerridge’s Bar & Grill, the first London dining room from the Hand & Flowers superstar chef Tom Kerridge. The David Collins studio has reworked everything and I don’t love it.
Understandably, they want to give it the soul it lacked, but it seems diluted. The dark green they’ve used to try to make the gargantuan hall seem more intimate is a gorgeous colour but makes the room look like a swiftly repurposed bank. The red leather banquettes and chairs suggest an attempt to hit an establishment club note, but at the same time, a centrepiece metal sculpture of a man’s suit by Beth Cullen Kerridge – Mr Kerridge’s wife – reads as gold lamé rather than muscular smelting and brings an accidental hint of Hard Rock Café.
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The night I visited, there was a painfully unhip soundtrack of Fleetwood Mac and INXS. Music is so tricky in restaurants – if it doesn’t surprise and make me happy (as The Breslin in New York does when they play obscure Bowie B-sides), then I’d prefer silence.
While I don’t love the look and the sound of things as much as I might, nor the pricing (my main was £32.50 and that’s the average), or indeed the pacing (three courses in a blur of 90 minutes), then the food itself is some of the best I’ve eaten in London this year. I’ve already booked a table at the Hand & Flowers as an early 2019 treat on the strength of it.
Kerridge is a genius. My eyes rolled in despair when an undrinkable negroni was the first thing to land on the table (and I mean that literally: I couldn’t get my lips to it for the mountain of small ice cubes), but seconds later they were rolling back again à la petite mort when I bit into the treacle bread. This is insanely delicious baking; sweet and moreish, like nothing I’ve tasted before. The glazed omelette “lobster thermidor” was more of a custard than an omelette, with substantial buttery chunks of crustacean, and while that all sounds mildly off-putting, it’s a dish that couldn’t be more lush or delicious. My venison with “Hand & Flowers” carrot, accompanied by parsley emulsion and black pepper cottage pie, was the meat and veg of the gods. Kerridge takes British trad and drowns it in chef alchemy: the Pig’s Cheek Pie is a sort of transcendental pork pie situation. The food here really is sensational, and on the Friday night I was there, it finally felt like a scene.
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In 2018 the Corinthia looks and feels like it’s just opened and is as impressive as ever – and the new Kerridge restaurant should put the international spotlight back on it. From the outlandish and joyous creations constantly under construction by the in-house florists, to the David Collins-designed elongated piano that doubles as a place to sit and sink martinis in the Bassoon Bar, this is one of the most opulent and special hotels in the capital, with myriad attractions for non-residents.
I’ve been taking friends to the Espa day spa here for years for birthday afternoons, and it’s still peerless. Espa creates treatments with meticulous R&D, and the spa’s dark onyx interior, thermal and pool areas are somewhere to dissolve away hour upon hour in bliss. I love the steel, the black and the neat lines of flame in the fireplaces – so Ken Adam, so chic. I was less keen on the noise emanating from a toddler-in-residence on the afternoon I was there, but hellion access is restricted to 10am-11.30am and 3pm-4.30pm (worth remembering).
Restaurants, spa and bars aside, the luxury elements of the common areas extend to every bedroom. Which is what you want and expect but not always what you get with five-star hotels. On this visit, I stayed in one of the refurbished London Suites (from £2,160). Here, again, is luxury you can’t achieve at home just by opening a new tin of Farrow & Ball: the pale woods, marble finishing and chandeliers in brass with blown glass orbs that look like supersized physics apparatus, shriek “big budget”, but in a sophisticated way. Frustratingly, I found the air conditioning and bedroom lighting unfathomable (is the ability to only control the reading light on your partner’s side of the bed a novel test of marital stability and compatibility?), and I had to have a Bluetooth speaker sent to my room as connectivity wasn’t working as advertised, but everything else was perfect. A little grit in the oyster, for sure, but the Corinthia has always felt like one of the most ambitious hotels in the city. And on most counts, it succeeds. Now, more than ever.
Rooms from £594; breakfast £36. Whitehall Place, London, SW1A 2BD; 020 7930 8181
