Eating in hotel restaurants was something people did in the 80s. Or at least, it was something I did a lot in the 80s as my Dad used to be an hotelier, so dinner in the hotel restaurant was a regular treat. I’m not sure when it fell out of fashion, but nowadays hotel restaurants tend to be populated with suits on business trips (less embarrassing, somehow, to eat alone in your hotel) and a few elderly regulars whose dining habits haven’t changed in decades.
But, like all fashions, I reckon hotels might be making a bit of a comeback as credible eating and drinking establishments. Not least because – and this I’ve discovered only through my research for the World’s Best Bars website – hotels are some of the few places to find a decent cocktail in the city. Sure, there are the speakeasys and the hipster places, bit given that they’re both so damned hard to get into (and even if you do you’ll rarely get a seat), the relative peace and spaciousness of hotel bars offer some welcome calm – and often better service.
I went to the Okura Hotel last Saturday ostensibly to check out the Twenty Third Bar, which was (despite what I’ve just said) packed out with tourists, locals, hotel visitors and outsiders in equal measures. So after a quick martini with the girls, we headed downstairs to Serre – the affordable sister restaurant to the hotel’s Michelin-starred Ciel Bleu.
The “Bibendum menu” offered three courses for €35 or four for €46.50, with the bonus (for me!) of the three-course option being that one of them didn’t have to be dessert… I started with the carpaccio, which was a generous portion of beef stacked on baby gem lettuce with truffle mayo, rocket, pine nuts and a giant crouton. It was hard to fault, but I found myself feeling nostalgic for the simpler, heartier, less restaurant-y version of the dish I’d first fallen in love with in Paris 15 years ago.
My favourite course was the pasta primavera, which arrived in a cute casserole pot filled with orecchiette, asparagus, mushrooms and a green herby sauce. Thin slices of Cecina de León came on the side, as well as a small dish of grated parmesan that you could sprinkle on the pasta yourself.
My main left me with much the same feeling as my carpaccio: the fish & chips “Serre style” were overly self-conscious and came with a tartar “foam” that would have been much happier as a simple mayo-based sauce. The mushy peas were puréed and piped, which had the unfortunate side effect of drying them out.
While Serre’s Bibendum menu may be pretty good value, the bill can still stack up fast when a bottle of wine starts at €35 and a small bottle of still water comes in at a staggering €6. Plus, for simple classics like carpaccio and fish & chips, I’d rather go to a casual Italian trattoria and an English chippie. Which comes back to my original point about the comeback of hotel restaurants: while they may be reinventing themselves, they need to offer something that customers can’t get better elsewhere, or they run the risk of slipping further back into the past. Some do, but for me, Serre doesn’t.
