A new cooking competition gives a lip-smacking taste of London’s fine dining. Here’s some more capital cuisine
Five Star Kitchen: Britain’s Next Great Chef Thursday 8.00pm C4
Ed Grenby - 2 June 2023
Seventy-five quid for a cuppa and a Wagon Wheel? That – and if you can pardon the price you can pardon the pun – is how they roll at London’s five-star hotel dining hotspots. Weirder still, it’s worth every penny. I’m taking tea at The Langham, London’s original grand hotel. It was the first to serve the suddenly fashionable new meal of “Afternoon Tea”, back in 1865, and continues to do so in the same elegant room today. But alongside the almost-unchanged, deliciously delicate cucumber finger sandwiches and clotted-cream-laden scones, they’re also currently dishing up fun and nostalgic “reimagined versions” of such familiar treats as the Walnut Whip, Jammie Dodger, custard cream and Bounty bar. The “Wagon Wheel” is actually an almond sablé, raspberry compote and marshmallow dipped in Valrhona chocolate. That “cuppa”, too, is from a selection of 17 gourmet, single-garden teas. I’ve gone for one from Yong’an Garden, Hangzhou, in China (“Refreshingly complex, these young, spring-picked buds have been selected from an organic garden surrounded by lush green forest,” reads the menu. “Skilfully pan-fired, they produce a tea with distinct chestnut notes and a velvety texture”). But things are about to change dramatically here at The Langham’s Palm Court restaurant.
In Five-Star Kitchen, starting this week on Channel 4, leading chefs from across the country are competing for a truly life-changing prize: after six weeks of gruelling grilling (and frying, baking and roasting), one will take over Palm Court and create their own restaurant in this historic dining room. Presiding over the programme are the hotel’s head chef, Michel Roux Jr, and two restaurant experts already fairly familiar to viewers of culinary TV shows, Mike Reid and Ravneet Gill. But off-camera is the man who has to have the new restaurant ready to open by the time the series finishes in just a few weeks’ time, The Langham’s executive chef and director of food and beverage projects, Chris King. The competition may be a crazy idea, King concedes, “but no one goes into the hospitality industry for an easy life”
Certainly the contestants aren’t getting one. “Five-star hotels provide a really unique challenge for chefs,” King tells me. “They may already have excelled in restaurant cooking, but at a hotel, To receive emails with our latest news and offers, visit radiotimes.com/email you’ve got room service, banqueting, breakfast… A lot of chefs are really afraid of breakfast, because it’s so fast-paced and because it’s very hard to surprise diners when, at the end of the day, everyone just wants fried egg and bacon.”
There’s already plenty to catch guests happily unawares at The Langham, though (langhamhotels.com). My room, overlooking the BBC’s main base at Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus, is every bit as refined and relaxing as you’d expect, but downstairs in the hotel’s award-winning bar, Artesian, cocktails come with Discarded Banana Peel Rum, Tomato Water and even Blue Cheese, and the young and notably good-looking crowd (and similarly handsome waiters) are still going strong at 1am. I have dinner at the hotel’s “tavern”, The Whigmore where hoptails – that’s cocktails but with beer, very popular 200 years ago, apparently – sit alongside spiced duck pastilla and Bloody Mary salted chips on the menu. (The food is fantastic, as is one of the hoptails that I try; another, involving Guinness, I’m afraid went unfinished.)
The Langham isn’t London’s only luxury hotel with “destination dining” attached, of course. Other notable “grande dame” institutions include The Ritz, The Connaught Grill and Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, and the decorous service at these is as much part of the appeal as the perfectly executed food. Big-name chefs are the draw at Nobu Hotel Shoreditch and Wolfgang Puck’s Cut at 45 Park Lane, but the most exciting is Dinner, Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant at Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park (mandarinoriental.com).
Here, in an exquisite old building on the park itself, rooms have a view directly over either glamorous Harvey Nichols and the high-society whirl of Knightsbridge or the gorgeous green vistas of the park’s Serpentine lake – and some truly revelatory things are happening with food. The menu draws on Blumenthal’s research into historic British cuisine as well as his “molecular gastronomy”, the highlight being his Meat Fruit, a chicken liver parfait masquerading as a mandarin, with its roots in a dish from around 1500. (How do I know the year? Diners place one of three cards on their table to show the waiting staff how much info they want from them.) London’s hotel restaurants have some great views (see Sea Containers London, ME London and Treehouse Hotel), but unquestionably the best is 35 storeys high at Shangri-La The Shard (shangri-la. com). Here, TING restaurant serves suitably sky-high-quality Cantonese cuisine, with a miso cod in white soy and shiitake broth among the menu standouts. Stay the night (ask for a room facing west to see all the way down the Thames to Westminster and even Wembley Stadium), have dinner (go for a table facing north, to look out over the Tower, the City and St Paul’s), and leave time in the morning for that once-in-a lifetime cloud-level front crawl in the small-but-gorgeous swimming pool. Then finish off fried egg and bacon for breakfast, of course…
Seventy-five quid for a cuppa and a Wagon Wheel? That – and if you can pardon the price you can pardon the pun – is how they roll at London’s five-star hotel dining hotspots. Weirder still, it’s worth every penny. I’m taking tea at The Langham, London’s original grand hotel. It was the first to serve the suddenly fashionable new meal of “Afternoon Tea”, back in 1865, and continues to do so in the same elegant room today. But alongside the almost-unchanged, deliciously delicate cucumber finger sandwiches and clotted-cream-laden scones, they’re also currently dishing up fun and nostalgic “reimagined versions” of such familiar treats as the Walnut Whip, Jammie Dodger, custard cream and Bounty bar. The “Wagon Wheel” is actually an almond sablé, raspberry compote and marshmallow dipped in Valrhona chocolate. That “cuppa”, too, is from a selection of 17 gourmet, single-garden teas. I’ve gone for one from Yong’an Garden, Hangzhou, in China (“Refreshingly complex, these young, spring-picked buds have been selected from an organic garden surrounded by lush green forest,” reads the menu. “Skilfully pan-fired, they produce a tea with distinct chestnut notes and a velvety texture”). But things are about to change dramatically here at The Langham’s Palm Court restaurant.
In Five-Star Kitchen, starting this week on Channel 4, leading chefs from across the country are competing for a truly life-changing prize: after six weeks of gruelling grilling (and frying, baking and roasting), one will take over Palm Court and create their own restaurant in this historic dining room. Presiding over the programme are the hotel’s head chef, Michel Roux Jr, and two restaurant experts already fairly familiar to viewers of culinary TV shows, Mike Reid and Ravneet Gill. But off-camera is the man who has to have the new restaurant ready to open by the time the series finishes in just a few weeks’ time, The Langham’s executive chef and director of food and beverage projects, Chris King. The competition may be a crazy idea, King concedes, “but no one goes into the hospitality industry for an easy life”
Certainly the contestants aren’t getting one. “Five-star hotels provide a really unique challenge for chefs,” King tells me. “They may already have excelled in restaurant cooking, but at a hotel, To receive emails with our latest news and offers, visit radiotimes.com/email you’ve got room service, banqueting, breakfast… A lot of chefs are really afraid of breakfast, because it’s so fast-paced and because it’s very hard to surprise diners when, at the end of the day, everyone just wants fried egg and bacon.”
There’s already plenty to catch guests happily unawares at The Langham, though (langhamhotels.com). My room, overlooking the BBC’s main base at Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus, is every bit as refined and relaxing as you’d expect, but downstairs in the hotel’s award-winning bar, Artesian, cocktails come with Discarded Banana Peel Rum, Tomato Water and even Blue Cheese, and the young and notably good-looking crowd (and similarly handsome waiters) are still going strong at 1am. I have dinner at the hotel’s “tavern”, The Whigmore where hoptails – that’s cocktails but with beer, very popular 200 years ago, apparently – sit alongside spiced duck pastilla and Bloody Mary salted chips on the menu. (The food is fantastic, as is one of the hoptails that I try; another, involving Guinness, I’m afraid went unfinished.)
The Langham isn’t London’s only luxury hotel with “destination dining” attached, of course. Other notable “grande dame” institutions include The Ritz, The Connaught Grill and Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, and the decorous service at these is as much part of the appeal as the perfectly executed food. Big-name chefs are the draw at Nobu Hotel Shoreditch and Wolfgang Puck’s Cut at 45 Park Lane, but the most exciting is Dinner, Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant at Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park (mandarinoriental.com).
Here, in an exquisite old building on the park itself, rooms have a view directly over either glamorous Harvey Nichols and the high-society whirl of Knightsbridge or the gorgeous green vistas of the park’s Serpentine lake – and some truly revelatory things are happening with food. The menu draws on Blumenthal’s research into historic British cuisine as well as his “molecular gastronomy”, the highlight being his Meat Fruit, a chicken liver parfait masquerading as a mandarin, with its roots in a dish from around 1500. (How do I know the year? Diners place one of three cards on their table to show the waiting staff how much info they want from them.) London’s hotel restaurants have some great views (see Sea Containers London, ME London and Treehouse Hotel), but unquestionably the best is 35 storeys high at Shangri-La The Shard (shangri-la. com). Here, TING restaurant serves suitably sky-high-quality Cantonese cuisine, with a miso cod in white soy and shiitake broth among the menu standouts. Stay the night (ask for a room facing west to see all the way down the Thames to Westminster and even Wembley Stadium), have dinner (go for a table facing north, to look out over the Tower, the City and St Paul’s), and leave time in the morning for that once-in-a lifetime cloud-level front crawl in the small-but-gorgeous swimming pool. Then finish off fried egg and bacon for breakfast, of course…
Ed Grenby