Apsleys

The Lanesborough hotel is great fun for amateur anthropologists. Men in bowler hats open the door for you; a bar to the left has the tidiest bookshelves and stiffest drinkers you will ever see. The corridors look like a scene from 'The Shining'. And then there's the 'new' restaurant, a very grand room in an equally grand building - where a friend assures me she was born (when The Lanesborough was still in service as St George's Hospital). The service is eerily perfect, from the soignée Italian greeter (blonde and taller than a beach volleyball player) to the charming restaurant manager. As we enter the imposing room, liveried staff turn and welcome us; light streams in through the huge conservatory roof as though the heavens were opening. Is that St Peter bowing towards us?

This dining room used to be called The Conservatory, but in the way of posh hotel restaurants, it needed a new look to attract new money. So a design team was employed to turn it into a box of chocolates, ordered and fussy in the details with soothing tones of caramel and toffee, hazelnut and almond. If the huge chandeliers were made of spun sugar by a confectioner, I'd not be surprised.

With attentive service and such an opulent interior you might reasonably expect fussy food, but not so. The new chef is Nick Bell, who used to work at Cecconi's and before that at Zafferano: the food is simple, rustic Italian, mainly sourced from top Italian producers.

The breads were exquisite. They included crisp pane carasau, some unctuous focaccia, grissini; all made in the kitchen and served with grassy olive oil and balsamic vinegar dips of outstanding depth of flavour.

Culatello, an expensive cured ham from Parma, is served in a simple mound of slivers sprinkled with pecorino and grilled pane carasau. The ham had a rich, primordial taste, but the pecorino lifted it so much, this pig could almost fly.

Bigoli pasta (thick strands) are served with a paste of sea urchins, their savoury flavour contrasted with peperoncino (sweet Italian peppers): unexpectedly wonderful. The least successful dish was a fillet of swordfish, because its herb crust gave it an unearthly green hue that resembled bread mould. Yet it tasted fine, especially with its salad of fennel and slivers of the bitter endive the Italians call puntarella. Everywhere else in Europe bitter flavours are expunged from cooking, but in Italy this elemental taste is still appreciated and celebrated, in moderation.

Puddings are equally simple but perfectly rendered. A cannolo is a Sicilian tube of pastry filled with sweetened ricotta cheese, in this case with an orange sauce. Every detail was perfect, as it should be when you're paying prices that would make even a Sicilian padrino whimper for mercy.

If you chose to, you could have a very, very good time at Apsleys with its choice of 16 wines by the glass, dispensed from an Enomatic wine preservation system. There are around 500 wines in total - Italian and French mostly - and you can spend as much as you need to impress upon your date the importance of the occasion, and the seriousness with which you take it. At the next table, three remarkably sober celebrities - David Frost, Michael Palin and Joanna Lumley - appeared to be doing just that.
Guy Dimond. Photography Michael Franke

Time Out Issue 1966: May 8-14

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