This article was also published in the Financial Times.
The Dorchester Hotel on London's Park Lane has just opened its third restaurant in association with an outside partner. While the China Tang and Alain Ducasse restaurants in the main hotel under-deliver and overcharge in my experience, CUT on the ground floor of the Dorchester's apartments at 45 Park Lane, recently opened in collaboration with Austrian-born chef Wolfgang Puck, one of the founders of modern California cooking movement 25 years ago, has far more fundamental flaws.
CUT suffers from the outset because it lacks the natural advantages of a decent-sized room and a separate entrance that are the ideal prerequisites for a successful hotel restaurant. The space it occupies is mean, following the curve of the outside wall, and tapers even more narrowly at the far end, where unnecessary trolleys obstruct the flow for customers and staff alike. It would have made an attractive café that morphed into a classy bar in the evening, but the hotel's management has greedily and unwisely decided to squeeze a restaurant into this slice of real estate.
By the windows during the day compensation comes in the views across to Hyde Park. However, no attempt seems to have been made to offset the combination of an extremely high ceiling, wood on all walls, thick, unyielding tiles on the floor, and an extremely loud and repetitive sound system. The third rendition of songs by the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Mamas and Papas during dinner were two too many for our party and this barrage gets in the way not only of conversation around the table but also of communicating easily with the waiters. My request for a coffee and some toothpicks resulted, instead, with the presentation of the bill.
My first meal there, a weekday lunch, at least yielded experiences that I can now look back on and laugh about. The first came as I was waiting for my guest. In strode another customer conspicuously wearing training shoes (and woollen ear muffs!), in contravention of the dress code pompously appended to all emailed booking confirmations, without being stopped or reprimanded. The second came when the entreaties to 'Enjoy' my meal reached double figures during a two-course lunch, after which I stopped counting.
The final memorable experience came with my analysis of the bill. Lunch for two from the à la carte menu – and there is, tellingly, no set menu – without any alcoholic drink, came to £114.19 and two items stood out. Two Virgin Marys, a serving of tomato juice, cost price no more than 15p each, plus ice and a splash of Worcester sauce, came to £19. Our two first courses, a soup and a tomato salad with anchovies, came to £21. Like the anchovies, I felt filleted.
Dinner began with the rather surreal experience of a frail young waitress staggering towards our table with a large tray on which was a plate of six cuts of raw red meat, three folded in white cloth, three in black. These different cuts she proceeded to explain in some detail before taking them back to the fridge to await another set of bemused customers. What I couldn't help but notice was that the reaction of quite a few women in the room to this display was to order fish.
But the flesh show did provide yet another pretext for the staff to interrupt our conversation, a practice at which they seem already to be world champions. Presumably because of the hotel's backing, the restaurant is massively overstaffed in a way that no independent restaurateur could afford (at one stage I witnessed eight staff queuing up to serve a table of four!) and they all seem to be desperately keen to engage verbally with the customers as often a possible, no matter how intense the conversation they are interrupting. I couldn't help seeing my neighbour at the next table grimace as he was interrupted yet again in the middle of his main course. His answer to the waitress's latest question was remarkably polite in the circumstances: 'Thank you, but I simply don't know what else to say.'
All this would be somewhat less infuriating if the cooking were either exciting or even reasonably priced, but it is neither.
Puck at the moment is a definite presence. He was in the restaurant when we arrived, sat and shared a glass of Château Talbot 2000 at another table, and told me that he would be here for another 10 days and subsequently back and forth between the UK and the US. Inspiration and thoughtfulness for the customer must now be his priorities.
Certainly, nothing we ate was out of the ordinary. A bone marrow 'flan' came with limp bread and far too little of the promised caper and parsley salad. The steaks which constitute what one might call the meat of the menu, beef from various breeds and several different countries, are cooked in such a way that they develop a particularly charred outer skin, which my guest solemnly cut off, and said was consequently far better without it. And both the sauces, the classic French béarnaise and spicier Argentine chimichurri were lacklustre. The dessert menu may well appeal to teenagers with a very sweet tooth although much effort has been put into presentation. When we asked for sorbets that were not listed but are the most refreshing end to any meal, we were directed instead to a caramel bar with chocolate and a tiny scoop of blackberry sorbet on the side.
I left CUT with two strong impressions. The first is that its management here has not followed what I once learnt was a guiding principle for all hoteliers, that they should spend the night in each bedroom to appreciate what the customer will or will not enjoy. Nobody seems to have sat down and put themselves in their customers' shoes.
More tellingly, CUT may mark the fin du siècle, the end of an era of restaurants created by unlikely alliances and excessive funding. I do hope so.
CUT, www.45parklane.com