Claridge's - the height of cool

This review was first published in January 2001

Rumours in gastronomic circles are not uncommon. Since the beginning of the year some intriguing gossip has been circulating involving Gary Rhodes, the Roux brothers and most recently Gordon Ramsay: what makes this titbit of culinary tittle-tattle so tasty is that it concerns, of all places, Claridge's.

Rather like the venerable couture houses of Paris, it seems that Claridge's, once arguably the most staid of London hotels, the place where Winston Churchill sought refuge after losing the 1945 election, is casting about for a named and famed talent to star in its restaurant.

A couple of years ago this Brook Street institution was about as relevant to modern London as the oeuvre of Barbara Cartland. It was an Art Deco carbuncle on the backside of swinging London.

With its wedding-cake school of interior design, the velvet knickerbockers on the ensemble squeezing out a musical repertoire that would not have seemed out of place on the Titanic, and a teatime menu that included Batten-burg cake, the place looked like a walking cemetery full of the sort of people whose idea of a popular musician was No'l: Coward not Gallagher.

Then the unthinkable happened - Claridge's became cool.

The transformation began two and a half years ago when London's most celebrated restaurant designer David Collins was let loose on what had been a buffet restaurant called the Causerie. It was the sort of place you would only otherwise have encountered between the covers of a Nancy Mitford novel. Collins transformed it into an extremely tempting cocktail bar.

Traditionalists regarded this move as heretical. "English snobs said, Don't change it'," recalls Collins, "but they only went there once a year and considered themselves regulars." In truth, I doubt that anyone went there quite as frequently as once a year. That's all changed. On any weekday night, you might find GQ magazine's style guru Jo Levin having a drink with model turned snapper Dan Macmillan. Tiziano Mazzilli of Voyage might be buying a round. Claridge's Bar has become the sort of place where you usually bump into one or two people who are in the current issue of Vogue.

And Collins freely admits that he created the space with an eye to giving "the nice-looking girls at Vogue House somewhere nice to go for a drink". And, as usual, he has succeeded.

So, naturally, when Voguette Bronwyn Cosgrave needed a venue for the launch of her fashion book, she chose the hotel.

It was a contrapuntal affair: Claridge's as normal until one pushed through the doors at the back of the foyer and was stopped dead by a wall of house music pumping out from some menacing-looking stacks of speakers. Cosgrave felt that the venue was in complete harmony with the prevailing Zeitgeist. "I think that what people want now is luxury. They don't want stark minimalism, they want to feel pampered and that is what the hotel does in spades. Luxury is running through Claridge's. Cool Britannia is unchic. People don't want new, new, new; they want quality and sophistication. And that comes with tradition."

A perfect visual endorsement of Cosgrave's theory about fashion's love affair with traditional luxury would seem to be the recent Versace advertising campaign in which, for once, the models were eclipsed by the sumptuous interiors in which they were shot. It is surely no coincidence that Donatella Versace is a frequent guest at Claridge's. But then Donatella is just one of the celebrities who hangs out at the "new" Claridges: George Clooney, John Galliano, Madonna and Matt Damon like it too.

The key to understanding the revival of Claridge's is that it is not new. "It is a bit like what you have seen in fashion," explains David Collins, "no one gets so excited if you say that there is a new designer call Jean Claude Kissmyass, but if you are relaunching, say, Jaeger, then people get excited."