A French farce in St James

This review was published in May 2002

I had been hearing all about the Sofitel St James for ages, how it would be a brand-new, bright, sparkling edifice, a shining beacon of luxury in the West End, an oasis of French savoir-faire in the historic heart of St James's blah, blah, blah.

I had my doubts. Sofitel sounds like the sort of name designed by committee and so, it seems, is the hotel. A former bank, it is an exercise in ham-fisted pseudo-quirkiness that includes a pianist cranking out easy-listening classics and a dark, plushly upholstered bar half-full of corporate drunks, flirting.

Brasserie Roux is in an L-shaped double-height room, which seemed proportionally out of balance. Service was impeccable; but everything else was, to put it politely, a disappointment. Although it had only been open for four days when I visited, the wallpaper was already peeling.

Brasserie Roux is the sort of place you could probably get away with if you were running a chain of conference hotels. If this is Sofitel's aim, it has achieved it. For customers it has to rely on corporate riff-raff, the sort who wear short-sleeved shirts with suits and ties and dream about driving a company Audi but will never progress beyond a Vauxhall. It was depressing.

Had I been able to order a few shavings of Prozac on my food I would have done so. Food was calculated to be inoffensive to conference delegates: a triumph of mediocrity that occasionally slipped into the insulting. I ordered macaroni gratin with truffles and gruy?re cheese.

I wanted to see how many truffles I'd get for £5.50 and what would be done to make such a dish more interesting than, well, macaroni cheese - the answers were 'none' and 'nothing' respectively: it looked like something that one's children might complain about eating and was distinguished only by the whiff of truffle oil.

My friend's foie gras (pan-fried with figs) was better. My main course of scallops arrived in a metal skillet, rather like my macaroni cheese, and seemed to have 'benefited' from the same sort of white sauce. It was not actively unpleasant, nor apparently was a dish of confit duck leg. The attentive staff seemed disappointed and genuinely surprised that I was not hanging around for pudding or coffee.

Marina O'Loughlin at Brasserie Roux
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