Those of you who like to take note of the passing seasons will probably have registered that this is the time when urban columnists, with unforgiving paper furrows to plough, look out of the window and knock off a hundred lyrical words on the springiness of spring; the wonder of small, vegetative things whose names you can’t quite remember or pronounce, like Tom Cruise’s children. And how this is a moment of hope, renewal, renaissance, lambs, baa, etc, etc.
Well, it may look like that, but it’s a big green deception. (Incidentally, have you also noticed that nobody ever credits nature with having designed camouflage? Well, you wouldn’t have, would you?) We are now in what anthropologists charmingly call the hunger gap, the months when the stored food runs out before the new harvest begins. The blustery, budding, shooting and fondling of spring is deceptively fecund, not to say loquaciously bosky and versishly verdant. In truth, a mere handful of generations back, this was the time when your bellybutton backed into your kidneys, when you chewed mud and died in a ditch looking for a blind dunnock. April is the cruellest month, bringing forth rural starvation. But at least you get primroses on your pauper’s grave.
We don’t really notice the entrance and exit of ingredients these days. Imagining that everything is available for the asking, always and ever, means that we don’t notice how bad, hard, dry and insipidly tasteless the forced and freighted produce we’re offered is. Only when you go abroad do you realise what so much of what we take for supermarket indigenous can really taste like. We do well in this country for stuff that shoals, bleeds and roots — wet makes good plaice, pasture and potatoes — but the sunniest stuff is pretty skanky and manky. Which sounds like a Cornish steamed pudding, probably with sprat heads and mace.
After Greenland, this is the worst country in the world to be a vegetarian in. And at the moment, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet (because there’s nowhere else for the bloody bee to go) about salads. We think that the omnipresent bowl of mixed leaves doused in some overanxious acid slime means that there are dozens and dozens of elegant little plants available for our delectation. Actually, it’s the same sweaty plastic bag of immigrant, chemically washed, industrially shredded, polytunnel-grown, winegum-coloured slug ration that every supermarket and restaurant uses. We eat fewer varieties of greenery than our great-grandparents did.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Turkey, and I was slapped in the gob by the vast, smiley cacophony of their produce, and the elegance and ingenuity with which it was prepared. Here, restaurant salads are a pathetic, repetitive, overgrown garnish, made without care, imagination or flavour. The vegetables offered on menus are shrinking to spinach, Kenyan beans and two anonymous types of potato. Chefs are giving up on vegetables, making them background mouth-fill or decoration. The quality and taste will only improve if cooks care enough to complain and search out the good green bits. I have every sympathy for children who don’t want to eat green things — schools and the health Nazis have made vegetables a five-a-day medicine, something to be got down, and most adults eat salad only if it’s mud-wrestling in mayonnaise in a bun, or as some sort of self-denying bikini mortification.
The Dorchester Grill Room doesn’t have a vegetable selection or a salad. There’s barely any mention of vegetables by name — but, frankly, that’s the least of its problems. The Dorchester has been the slowest of the old grand deluxe hotels to try to contemporise its public spaces and kitchen. David Tang’s Chinese restaurant and totty bar in the basement — where, if you can use a pair of chopsticks, you can pick up almost anyone — has been a notable success, but the lobby is still a dingy archipelago of artificially enhanced sofas and pot plants, with one of those pianists who makes you want to proclaim a fatwa on musical theatre. The Grill Room is a magic door off this. And no lazy left-hand rendition of Bess, You Is My Woman Now, played to a semi-comatose, jet-lagged family of Kuwaitis come for the new kidney, could possibly prepare you for the shrieking horror of the newly done-over Grill Room that lies behind it. It has, with great panache, expense and devil-take-the-hindmost braggadocio, transformed itself into the most laughably hideous dining room in London. No, credit where credit’s due, this is no time to be mealy-mouthed or damn with faint insult — why should only London bask in its horrendous radiance? It is the worst dining room in Britain, including Stow-on-the-Wold, probably in Europe, the globe, the galaxy, history, eternity, ever.
The first thing that strikes you, like a chilli-dipped tranny’s finger in the eye, is the 20-foot-high Scotsman on the opposite wall, a riot of biscuit-tin camp played with the mien of a ravenous rent boy. As you stumble back, aghast, you realise with delicious horror that he is not alone — there are more. Along with some Widow McTwankeys, there are bright-red velvet brothel bedheads and some gothicky sideboards. Finally, before your dancing eyes, you notice what you are standing on — a real tartan carpet. The risible knee-singer, beloved of 1980s Hoorays back from a ball.
We can only wonder at the planning meetings that came up with frescoes of gay Gordons and big Bessies. It is as if the Dorchester had leapt from its own closet. I imagine the swags and drawings and hand-waving as some designing ami de Dorothée convinced the management that Cally camp was the way to go-go. The whole glorious catastrophe kept me amused for an entire dinner. I would turn around, thinking that it might have palled into dull nastiness, but it never did — each reacquaintance revealed some new piece of hysterical wonder.
There was food, of course there was food. But for the life of me, it all passed in a bland blur. No kitchen could compete with the achingly bad taste of the decor. I do remember thinking it wasn’t terribly good, and I noticed from the bill that it’s very expensive. Actually, it’s ridiculously overpriced — Dover sole for £30, smoked salmon for £18, a roast pear for £10.50 — but then style doesn’t come cheap. Or at least it does, but you have to pay a lot for it.
As we left, the sweet head waiter plaintively asked if I liked it, the room, and I had to stuff a napkin in my mouth. He gave me a look of such pitiful agony, like a man drowning in an ocean of tartan, and I got a glimpse of what it must be like to work in this Brigadoon hell — the migraines, the nightmares, the humiliation, the aching for a job in a Japanese restaurant. I looked at the poor chap, the one dull Englishman in a miasma of Scot-isch, and it would have taken a heart of Scone stone not to have laughed in his face.
THE DORCHESTER GRILL ROOM
1 star
The Dorchester Hotel, 53 Park Lane, W1; 020 7317 6336
Lunch Mon-Sat, 12pm-2.30pm; Sun, 12.30pm-2.30pm. Dinner Mon-Sat, 6pm-11pm; Sun, 7pm-10.30pm
5 stars Ewan McGregor
4 stars Edinburgh Castle
3 stars Travis
2 stars Loch Ness monster
1 star Prestwick airport
