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Chris Galvin has been tempted away from the Baker Street bistro to relaunch the restaurant Windows on the World, at the top of the Hilton Park Lane, with Andre Garret lured away from Orrery to be head chef. . Hayler’s law says that food gets worse as it gets higher (think of airline food) and Windows on the World has historically followed that rule to the letter. Hence I was interested to see whether Mr Galvin could, as it were, defy gravity and produce decent food at such heights. Mostly, it seems that he can. The setting is spectacular on a clear summer night such as this. From our window table we could look into the Queen’s back garden and over at the Battersea Power Station, observe the MI6 building and even see Crystal Palace. The dining room is pretty much all windows, with a brown carpet and oddly low wooden chairs to bring you down to earth.
Staff are formally dressed and the service was generally excellent, with flawless topping up of bread, water and wine, though there was a delay in serving the petit fours. The waiting staff were just a bit overly keen to sell you extra wine, but otherwise the service was fine. The wine list stretches over 17 pages but is a bit of a let down; growers are generally not the finiest, and markups are fierce and inconsistent. A simple Torres Gran Coronas 2010 was £34 for a wine that retails at £9.36, but a 1990 Vega Sicilai Unico was a simply ludicrous £898 for a wine that is £108 retail if you look carefully. This is over eight times retail, perhaps the worst markup I can recall. They should be ashamed of themselves. I even asked the “sommelier” (who seemed entirely clueless) about this and he just shrugged uncertainly, as if the wine list had nothing to do with him.
Bread is either baguette, white or whole grain rolls or slices of olive bread, and is of good quality (5/10). The bread is bought in from Marcus Miller, though the waiter initially tried to pretend that it was lovingly made by the staff here “they come in early each morning to make it”. Actually no, they come in to take delivery of it from a van. The menu is appealing, with sensible ingredient combinations and fairly expensive produce e.g. wild halibut rather than, say, offal or pollack. A starter had a central heap of fresh Dorset crab surrounded by a ring of good smoked salmon, itself encircled by a ring of salad leaves (5/10). Provencal tarte fine had a rectangular layer of delicate pastry on top of which was a vegetable layer with courgettes and tomatoes etc, and on top of this a series of slices of somewhat ordinary tuna (5/10). A main course risotto had a rather lacklustre stock and some strangely large and hence ordinary broad beans when surely baby broad beans would have been the thing? The risotto involved a few nicely cooked morel mushrooms and some rather pointless summer truffle (which to me always tastes rather like cardboard). 4/10 overall as the execution of the risotto was fine, but it could have been a better dish. My main course of wild halibut had excellent fish, fresh and well timed, served with a bed of cubes root vegetables (carrots, courgette, sweet corn etc) and spinach which then had a consommé of risotto poured all over it. The consommé was fine but it had the effect of making the vegetables, especially the spinach, limp; much better to have had this on the side, o not at all. The components were all good but the dish is a poor concept (4/10).
Dessert was a mixed affair: panacotta was very good, surrounded by a ring of tasty cherries (6/10) but a Valrhona chocolate palet d’or had the decorative gold leaf but sadly the chocolate itself had been waiting too long and was very soggy; it was visibly sagging when it was served, which an alert kitchen would have spotted; the raspberries with it were good though (3/10). Coffee was very good (7/10) as were fine Madeleines (one vanilla, one pistachio) and indeed these to me were the best thing all night (7/10). There were also a couple of good chocolates, though at £4.75 per person for coffee and petit fours you would hope for something good. The three courses of food were £50 each, which is tolerable though hardly cheap (and no petit fours) while the wine prices are uneven but, as noted earlier, high to scandalous. After adding service they also left the credit card slip open. Overall a pleasant experience, but you are still paying a bit over the odds for the view.
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