Michael Winner, of The Sunday Times, and The Observer’s Jay Rayner both review the Park Terrace at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Kinghtsbridge, London. Neither is terribly impressed.
Winner describes the food, as “horrendous”. The spring roll was old and tired, and tasted as if it had been deep frozen for ever. A rotting horse, fumes Winner, would have been better.
His main course of chicken and noodles was hard and dried out, a “total disgrace for a supposedly first-class hotel”.
To describe his pudding of apple crumble and ice cream as “moderate”, adds Winner, would be a compliment.
Rayner says he and his companion ate two “startlingly bad” main courses. They were, he adds, the sort of dishes which would justify a little light torture for those responsible – “a few stabs from the business end of a cattle prod, say, until they confessed their sins”.
The meat on his £24 dish of lamb schawarma was grey and flabby, as were the shameful chips, while the congealed lump of rice was simply an embarrassment.
The Independent on Sunday’s Terry Durack was happier with his food although he puzzled over why the owners of a new Italian restaurant in Holloway Road, north London, called it 500 when the street number was 782.
Finally he discovered that Mario Magli and Giorio Pili named it after Fiat’s iconic bug-shaped 500 car, which was produced in its millions between 1957 and 1975.
A simple enough menu with a hint of northern Italy and more than a dash of the south, Magli’s Sicilian rabbit was Italian slow-cooking at its best, with full-flavoured and tender meat served with a mountain of deeply-tanned, lightly-wrinkled roast potato wedges.
A creamy wedge of strawberry shortcake to follow looked like something out of delicious magazine’s August issue. It was only with some difficulty that Durack refrained from singing happy birthday to himself.
The Sunday Times 17/08/08 (News Review) page 4.14
The Observer 17/08/08 (Escape) page 59
The Independent on Sunday 17/08/08 (Magazine) page 47
