Steak out

Not a cheap cut: the plush interior

CUT at 45 Park Lane

The Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane has just opened its third restaurant in association with an outside partner. The China Tang and Alain Ducasse restaurants in the main hotel under-deliver and overcharge, in my experience.

CUT, which recently opened on the ground floor of the Dorchester’s apartments at 45 Park Lane, in collaboration with Austrian-born chef Wolfgang Puck, has far more fundamental flaws.

First of all, it wants for a decent-sized room and a separate entrance – prerequisites for a successful hotel restaurant. The space it occupies is mean, following the curve of the outside wall, and tapering narrowly at the far end, where unnecessary trolleys obstruct the flow for customers and staff. It would have made an attractive café that morphed into a classy bar in the evening, but the hotel’s management has unwisely decided to squeeze a restaurant into this slice of real estate.

During the day, the windows compensate with views across to Hyde Park. However, no attempt seems to have been made to offset the combination of high ceiling, wood on all walls, thick, unyielding floor tiles and an extremely loud and repetitive sound system. The third rendition of songs by the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Mamas and Papas during dinner was two too many for our party. The sound barrage gets in the way not only of table conversation but also of communication with the waiters. My request for a coffee and some toothpicks resulted, instead, in presentation of the bill.

Mini Kobe 'sliders'

The first meal I ate there, a weekday lunch, at least yielded experiences that I can now look back on and laugh about. The first came as I was waiting for my guest. In strode another customer wearing training shoes and woollen ear muffs, in contravention of the dress code appended to all e-mail booking confirmations. He was neither stopped nor reprimanded. The second came when entreaties to “Enjoy” my meal reached double figures during a two-course lunch, after which I stopped counting.

The final one came with the bill. Lunch for two from the à la carte menu – and there is, tellingly, no set menu – without any alcoholic drink, came to £114.19. Two Virgin Marys – a serving of tomato juice, cost price no more than 15p each, plus ice and a splash of Worcester sauce – came to £19. Our two first courses, a soup and a tomato salad with anchovies, came to £21. Like the anchovies, I felt filleted.

Dinner began with the rather surreal experience of a frail young waitress staggering towards our table with a large tray bearing a plate of six cuts of raw red meat, three folded in white cloth, three in black. She explained each cut in some detail before taking them back to the fridge to await the next set of bemused customers. The reaction of quite a few diners to this display was to order fish.

Porterhouse steak for two

The flesh show provided another pretext for the staff to interrupt our conversation. Presumably because of the hotel’s backing, CUT is massively overstaffed in a way no independent restaurateur could afford. My neighbour at the next table grimaced as he was interrupted yet again in the middle of his main course. His answer to the question was remarkably polite in the circumstances: “Thank you, but I simply don’t know what else to say.”

All this would be somewhat less infuriating if the cooking were either exciting or even reasonably priced, but it is neither.

Puck, one of the founders of the modern California cooking movement 25 years ago, was in the restaurant when we arrived, sharing a glass of Château Talbot 2000 at another table. He told me that he would be here for another 10 days and then back and forth between the UK and the US. Inspiration and thoughtfulness for the customer must now be his priorities.

Certainly, nothing we ate was out of the ordinary. A bone marrow “flan” came with limp bread and far too little of the promised caper and parsley salad. The steaks, beef from various breeds and several different countries, are cooked in such a way that they develop a charred outer skin, which my guest solemnly cut off. And the sauces, a classic French béarnaise and spicier Argentine chimichurri, were lacklustre. The dessert menu may well appeal to teenagers with a very sweet tooth, although much effort has been put into presentation. When we asked for sorbets, not listed but a most refreshing end to any meal, we were directed instead to a caramel bar with chocolate and a tiny scoop of blackberry sorbet on the side.

I left CUT with two strong impressions. The first is that its management has not followed what I once learnt was a guiding principle for all hoteliers: that they should spend the night in each bedroom to experience what the customer does. Nobody seems to have put themselves in the customers’ shoes.

More tellingly, CUT may mark the fin du siècle, the end of an era of restaurants created by unlikely alliances and excessive funding.

I certainly hope so.

nicholas.lander@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/lander

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CUT

45 Park Lane, London W1

020 7493 4554

www.45parklane.com