THE GORING HOTEL, 15 BEESTON PLACE, LONDON SW1 (020 7396 9000). MEAL FOR TWO, INCLUDING WINE, £180
The Goring Hotel, which has been open for 100 years, all of them in the ownership of the same family, is celebrating by putting on its restaurant menu a selection of dishes drawn from the various periods through which it has lived. It is a fun idea, though not necessarily the happiest route to a good meal.
Being selfless, I chose solely items that were marked as significant. And so from the "Thatcher years" came fillets of soused herring which, like the woman whose name they took, left a nasty aftertaste. This was food for people who had lost all their own teeth and then misplaced the replacements. They were mushy and dull and the cure was insipid.
For my main course I had, from those marked "War years and rationing", the steamed oxtail pudding. All I can say is that you can take a theme too far. A thick suet shell gave way to not very much at all, and certainly not the luscious, gravy-slicked strands of meat I had expected. The war has been over for 65 years. I didn't need to re-experience the privations in a luxury hotel dining room. A shamefully tiny number of curiously pink nuggets of slightly tough meat clung to the doughy enclosure as if for safety. I finished in the Edwardian era, with jam roly poly and custard. To resurrect that great old Jewish joke, the dish was lousy and the portion so small. In the middle of a custard lake sat a tiny roll of more suet, enclosing a smear of jam, as if they hadn't restocked since King Edward was on the throne. And all this for £47.50.
It was such a disappointment. My companion, who had suggested the Goring – I need to blame someone – had thought, reasonably enough, that a place that had endured for so long would specialise in the eternal verities. There is certainly something solid and reliable about the hotel, from the bowler-hatted door staff through to the plush bar and the Viscount Linley-designed dining room. It is a fantasy of cream and beige, the tables laid with crisp linen of a thickness whole families could easily camp under.
We got to study that dining room in some detail, because it was never more than a quarter full, leaving waiters with too little to do. They wandered the room attempting to fill glasses with more water if you took but one sip, until we batted them away. They are the kind of waiters who make the provision of a new napkin because yours has dropped to the floor feel like an admonishment, not a service. Similarly the wine list, which had nothing under the mid-twenties, is like some bedroom romp involving Michael Winner, Giles Coren and Michael Caine: an endless bout of gratuitous name dropping. There was nothing for those on a budget, just a merry roll of Latour, Pétrus, Montrachet and the rest. Three wines by the glass each cost more than £60, and the sommelier wasn't moved to let us taste before he poured, until we insisted.
That is not to say the Goring doesn't have its virtues. Around us we witnessed some lovely theatre: beef wellington, with an eye of meat the colour of velvet plush, being carved tableside; Dover sole being deftly filleted. My tablemate didn't eat badly either: a glazed lobster omelette, with a reasonable amount of the crustacean; grilled calf's liver with onion gravy and crisp bacon, and at the end a tidy, sweet apple tart with a walnut ice cream. Nice, but not exceptional. "It's up-to-London-for-the-day food," he said, which is patronising, but nowhere near as patronising as the restaurant itself.
Most curious was the pricing regime. The lobster omelette was included among the dishes available for £47.50, as was the smoked salmon, cod and sea bass. Other things carried bizarre supplements. Why would you have to pay an extra £7.50 for bleeding potted shrimps? (That's a mild expletive, not a food description.) Why was there an extra £4 for the calf's liver? It made no sense at all.
The fact is that for a long while this sort of food (which, done well, can be fabulous) went out of fashion. That's what places like the Goring and the old pre-Ramsay Connaught were for. But now you can get it for much less money at restaurants across London – Mark Hix does this kind of stuff, as does Richard Corrigan – and you don't have to endure the glowering mood. Clearly there are people who like the Goring, or it would not have survived for a century. Sadly, I'm not one of them.★
