Just because this is a restaurant review, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t adhere to all the usual journalistic principles, is there? You know, diligently collecting facts; scrutinising facts; turning sheets full of facts into aerodynamic paper darts to hurl at colleagues, which leaves no time to assemble fresh sheets full of facts, which results in your having to filch facts, as deadline nears, from nearby colleagues writing on completely different subjects, in turn resulting in an article mapping out the financial prospects of hedge funds being speckled with intriguing references to Caribbean hurricane movements and also to Lindsay Lohan’s routine lack of underwear when going about her business in public. Well, those are my journalistic principles, at any rate.

Let’s see, I believe there are some more traditional journalistic principles: “What, where, when, who, why and how much” (this last one is not a reference to chequebook journalism, but to the fact that restaurant reviews involve an exchange of cash at the end of the assignment). Let’s see if these principles work any better than mine (but I warn you: try the “why” and “how much” elements when writing about Lindsay Lohan’s underwear arrangements and you’ll soon find yourself having to deal with the newspaper’s lawyer).

What? Rhodes W1 Brasserie. Where? In the Cumberland Hotel, just by Marble Arch. Who? Me and the missus, if you must know. Why? Oh, Jeez, I knew this journalism lark would turn out way trickier than it looked. I’m not sure why. Why does anyone who is not staying in a hotel choose to eat in a hotel restaurant? Here and there you’ll find a destination restaurant in a hotel – Gordon Ramsay’s at Claridge’s, say, or Nobu in the Metropolitan. But a run-of-the-mill hotel restaurant trying to pitch itself as a great dining room which just happens to share a building with 480 bedrooms and a lobby the size of a hockey pitch can feel like a gesture.

What the phrase “hotel dining” mostly brings to mind is arriving in a strange city too late, or too tired, to check in your bags and then to scour unfamiliar streets in search of food, and so retiring to your room and dithering between room service and raiding the minibar.

The advantage of room service is that if you’re lucky they might do a cheeseburger, generally the only hot food worth risking from a hotel kitchen at 11.30pm; the downside is having to then wait until 1.30am for it to turn up. The advantage of the minibar is that it’s available immediately. The disadvantage? It’s that its contents have been chosen by someone who believes that (a) what you want when staying in a hotel is to eat macadamia nuts, a snack which no person has ever been known to crave at any time of year, and that (b) you are happy to pay for this jar of macadamia nuts a sum only slightly less than what you pay to get your car serviced. There is a third hotel dining option, available at 11.30pm, of strolling the hotel corridors helping yourself to other guests’ leftovers that they have parked outside their doors on room-service trays ready for collection: think of it as a floor-level buffet table. But few hotel guests are bold enough.

So, Rhodes W1 brasserie, then. This is one of those curious places that – despite having a huge number of covers, and being three quarters empty – asks if you would mind waiting at the bar while they prepare a table. Unless they’re going to call for a carpenter to saw one from raw timber, it’s hard to know why you should need to wait.

There is another reason not to wait. It’s a disheartening place to eat. The food is unmemorable, noise bounces off the stone floor and then ricochets around the cavernous room before returning to enter your dining companion’s ear, by which time it may have distorted beyond recognition, like a game of Chinese whispers. Most of the diners looked like hotel guests, some of them business travellers, chewing listlessly on a risotto while saying goodnight via mobile phone to children on another continent whom they last saw in person – as opposed to in the creased photo they carry around in their wallet – in April.

But then it turned out that we’d eaten in the wrong restaurant. There’s another Rhodes W1 in the very same hotel. So after spending a day wandering around London getting lost, tourists can return to their hotel and get lost all over again just trying to locate the correct Rhodes W1 they intended to dine in. Could the owners not be bothered to think up a different name – “Gary’s Brasserie”, say? Or what about “GReat”. Geddit? “G” for Gary, “R” for Rhodes, then “eat” for, well, for eat. Everyone would say: “GReat restaurant!”

The other Gary Rhodes restaurant is called, Rhodes W1 – but without brasserie at the end. What amplifies the confusion is that the only Rhodes W1 restaurant you can reach through the hotel’s lobby is the brasserie. To reach what they call the “fine dining” Rhodes W1, you must leave the hotel and walk around the back to a black door you walk past three times (not for some Masonic ritual, but because it is so unremarkable) before entering a plusher (in a WAGish way) dining room. The good news is that this is obviously the Rhodes restaurant we were supposed to be visiting in the first place. The worry was that the last time I ate in a proper Gary Rhodes restaurant, some years ago, Rhodes was still keen on that business of stacking up the food in layers till it became a teetering tower of spinach, topped by potatoes, then carrots, topped by lamb, capped by cauliflower, so that eating became a game of gastronomic Jenga. Slide out a pea from the centre of the edifice and the whole thing collapses and the waiters gather round to shout “Jenga!” in unison, as they do when singing Happy Birthday for a celebrating diner.

On a Saturday night, Rhodes W1 (“fine dining”) did seem to be quite busy with celebrating parties of various sizes. It’s that kind of a place. A place where you get fussed over, get seduced by a succession of tricksy canapes while you consult the menu, and where you find the eye-watering prices oddly reassuring because – being so much more muscular than you would normally dream of paying for dinner – they confirm the celebratory nature of the outing.

This is existentialist eating out: it’s expensive, therefore it is a celebration meal. And people who go out for a celebration meal, and who pay this kind of money for it, don’t wish to be served food they feel they could have cooked easily enough themselves at home. So the modern fashion for good quality ingredients, cooked very simply, doesn’t reign in this kitchen (nor, for that matter, does Gary Rhodes; the chef here is Brian Hughson, so no food towers, either). Instead, dishes arrive with sauces and fripperies, and with this jus and that flourish, so that each mouthful is like a mini-smorgasbord of flavours. No, you couldn’t rustle this up at home. But would you wish to? This is the sort of food, served in modest, manicured portions, that takes longer for the waiter to describe than for you to eat. Starters like double oyster ragout – sea oysters and chicken oysters mixed up with samphire and herbs; or sardines served with sweet onions, inside a pastry case and doused with a sorrel butter sauce. Sweetbreads are served with crayfish and quail’s eggs. Suckling pig ravioli come in a soupy jus and apple sauce.

Main courses of salt roast pigeon and spring lamb with tomato and tarragon navarin were good. But good enough? Prices are £39.50 for two courses, £45 for three. Our bill for only two courses, with water, coffee, service and wine which – at £19 – was the cheapest bottle on the list by a fat margin, topped £130. Given that many dishes carry supplements of £7 to £10 (choosing cheese as your third course carries an £8 surcharge), the bill for a couple eating three courses and drinking moderately well would easily top £200. That’s an awful lot of money, isn’t it? Unless you’re out celebrating, in which case: Hooray!

Rhodes W1
Great Cumberland Place, London W1
020-7479 3737
Lunch and dinner, Tuesday to Friday. Saturday, dinner only.

Giles Coren is away

Book a table at Rhodes W1

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