Watching over London town, Galvin at Windows is situated on the 28th floor of the prestigious London Hilton on Park Lane hotel. We enter through the swish, polished-marble interior of the hotel lobby and the lifts whoosh you up to in a matter of seconds to the top floor where Galvin’s is located.
This year has brought some very good meals (Pied a Terre, Chez Bruce, Hibiscus), some average ones (Tom Aikens, Arbutus) and some damn right terrible (Umu). In the ‘very good’ column I can add Galvin at Windows and Bistro de Luxe, so I was very interested in seeing what the brothers had managed to do with their new venture. Would it be a restaurant too far or a City winner?
There still may be just a whisper of game left if you’re quick. Two very different establishments this season, with opposing cuisines, have been in on the act of serving the furred and the feathered. Anita Pati gives them both a shot.
For those of you who are familiar with GBK, Clink Street is the chain's 50th outlet and rather different from the norm for a few reasons, the most striking of which is that it offers full restaurant service, rather than ordering and paying at a counter, which is how it works everywhere else.
Recession what recession? Those in work are having it large, with ever decreasing mortgage repayments giving them more cash to splash. Maybe that’s why here in Gilgamesh on a Wednesday night the bar is pretty full and the restaurant is too. In the private dining room, a hundred and fifty people are tucking into chef Ian Pengelley’s Pan Asian food and the man himself can be seen in his open kitchen toiling away happily.
“Hello? Is that the Chinese takeaway? Great, can I have Ox tendon in spicy oil, fried green beans with preserved vegetable and chilli, Sichuan style tofu and seafood, fried pork tendons in spicy salt, a skewered whole quail and the fried lamb with onion and lots of cumin and chilli. What do you mean you’ve never heard of any of that? What kind of Chinese restaurant are you?”
It’s a cliché of course to say that restaurants like Greens offer comfort food for the upper classes. This is a notion based on the idea that the upper classes don’t like ‘fancy’ food or stuff from Johnny Foreigner. They’re supposed to only like food that reminds them of nursery or public school. Well, as it happens, I am an ex-public schoolboy meself doncha know and we were never served oysters or lobster at our place. No doubt things were different at Eton.