Aubrey Restaurant caters to a captive clientele

15 October 2012

London is tricky enough when you live here and have a home to go to. Sometimes you still get caught out, needing a place to eat unplanned, somewhere to meet or to flop, in an unfamiliar area. Then you get a little insight into how pricey and unhelpful London can seem to visitors.

I suspect Londoners can then even feel a little flash of compassion for tourists having to shell out, more or less blindly, for every meal, every drink, for their whole stay — not that any such sympathy is ever likely to be expressed — just a passing inward shudder, you know.

The Doyle Collection is a group of 11 international hotels, in Boston, Washington, Dublin and London. Here they have the Bloomsbury and the Marylebone — and now the Kensington, a big place on the Brompton Road end of Queen’s Gate, with 150 rooms in total, beginning at £350 a night.

Big hotels have to have restaurants. And it’s difficult to make them profitable or appealing to anybody other than their captive, or as they would rather say, resident clientele. Some try to solve the problem by hosting a big-name chef — a Ramsay, a Wareing — who will attract their own customers. But that slightly defeats the purpose and the price becomes a deterrent to residents who just want to eat quickly, conveniently and not too expensively.

So — it’s a problem. No hotel ever likes to admit that its restaurant is really only for stayers lacking the nous to step out, though it’s usually the case. The publicists for the newly opened Aubrey — aspirationally named after Aubrey de Vere, granted the estate of Kensington by William the Conqueror — earnestly hope that this "intimate and glamorous" restaurant will appeal to "those discerning diners in search of an elegant night out, until now so difficult to find in the area". Watch out for flying pigs, too. Nor had I realised South Ken was such a deprived zone. Thank heaven it enjoys decent transport links to better favoured areas.

On Friday lunchtime we were the only customers in the 80-cover restaurant until a senior American couple, laden with shopping bags, joined us. Aubrey offers a reasonably priced set lunch, at £14.50 for two courses, £19 for three, but, although we vaguely supposed that was what we had ordered, we ended up billed à la carte. The wine list is frankly punitive too, the cheapest bottle coming in at £20. An ordinary Provençal rosé was £29, a bottle of San Pellegrino £5.

The décor, by Denis Looby, is "designed to evoke a contemporary townhouse feel", not to mention a "club-like atmosphere". We found it withered the soul. You could be in a hotel anywhere in the world, in Brussels or Boston, instead of London. There are green leatherette banquettes, tables panelled in veneer, beige hessian walls and a strikingly nasty brass-and-smoked-glass light-fitting with faux candles. Horrible Muzak, single red roses on the tables. On the shelves around, there are Chinese pottery objets d’art and a random selection of books, or, rather, bindings, to lend an air of learning so long as they are never consulted, then revealing themselves to include a bit of Goethe in German and a full set of an old school textbook in Swedish.

Warm salad of black pudding with English asparagus (£6) was a triangular arrangement, with a poached egg in the centre, the pleasant enough asparagus let down by the three little pieces of dry, mealy sausage, not a nice thing to put in your mouth at all. Tiny dice of potato and pieces of bacon didn’t help. A "lightly spiced fish and crab cake" (£6) was one large, deep-fried ball, again dryish, that needed some sauce or just lemon but came instead with a coriander-dominated avocado mush and some limp leaves.

Grilled calves’ liver (£15) was a big portion, nicely cooked, with bacon and then bits of pancetta again in the bubble-and-squeaky mash of potato and Savoy cabbage. This was genuinely good quality comfort food and had one been served it in an atmospheric pub would have seemed just the thing. The kitchen here, run by executive chef Russell Ford, is competent enough. A "chicken lunch" (£13) was much the same, blandly acceptable, bacony again. Obviously we should instead have taken up the challenge of The Doyle Collection Burger served with Kensington Fries. Sorry.

We did assay Fabulous Fromage (£9), "the chef’s choice of exclusive French cheeses", five mini-portions, including Brillat-Savarin and Fourme d’Ambert, fussily served with walnuts (supposedly "wine-soaked", undetectable), a little bowl of honey, a few bits of apple and a couple of slices of bread. And for the ladees, Kensington Strawberry Plate (£6) proved an intimidating array comprised of a homemade strawberry sorbet, nicely flavoured but very sweet, a strawberry tart with some berries sitting on a lot of cream, plus a strawberry milkshake that made all that had come before seem scarcely sweet at all.

Service was assiduous but disconcerting, first from some Eastern Europeans with imperfect English and a Rosa Klebb manner, then from a curious Frenchman with shoulder-length hair. The bill for £98.50 arrived with the legend "Service charge is not included, we recommend a gratuity of 10-15 per cent." For that price, London should be your oyster, not the Aubrey.

Aubrey Restaurant at the Kensington Hotel
109-113 Queen’s Gate, SW7 5LR

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