Don't be boring - hit the Goring

This review was first published in May 2000

Roy Hattersley did not look happy. Perhaps it was the way I sauntered into the dining-room in a three-piece suit of pink corduroy, brandishing a toning pink Dupont lighter. There you are, a former Labour titan who has at last got a proper job as a journalist, you are taking the missus out for a quiet supper at The Goring Hotel and suddenly some idiot in a pink suit waltzes in trilling: 'Don't be boring/ Let's go The Goring.' In fact I think that ought to be: 'It would be erring/Not to visit The Goering.'

But some time before the Boer War, the family that owns this eponymous hotel dropped the umlaut over the 'o' as a patriotic gesture. I believe that it was at about the same time or a few years later that The Coburg changed its name to The Connaught and the Battenbergs became the Mountbattens. As is often the way with those who come from abroad (and as someone who is half German, half Welsh, I feel I speak with some authority on this matter), the Gorings have embraced the English way of life with a ruthless efficiency that betrays their Teutonic ancestry.

The delightful maitre d' of the restaurant spoke respectfully of 'Mr Goring' in a way that reminded me of Upstairs Downstairs. Like our dear Royal Family, who I hope are proud of their Hanoverian ancestry, the Gorings are rather more English than the English and theirs is possibly the most English hotel in London.

Tucked away behind Buckingham Palace, it is discreet and has that uniquely English-hotel feel about it. Although nothing like as grand as The Connaught, which along with Giles Shepard's Ritz is my favourite London hotel, it has a similar tenor. Others may call it depressing or dreary, but I rather like the end-of-season melancholia that envelops supper at The Goring.

While the Mazzilli dynasty - of supercool boutique Voyage - may patronise the David Collins-designed bar at Claridge's, and while The Metropolitan and The Sanderson may slug it out for the title of hippest hotel, The Goring ploughs its own furrow. It has been refurbished in recent years, but it's almost as if the brief to the decorator was: 'Give me something anachronistic, inoffensive, something that says not-quite-grand-but-trying-hard-Central-London-hotel'.

Given its proximity to Buckingham Palace and its air of understated restraint, it has long been popular with dignitaries and minor Euro royals in town for coronations. The exceptional photographs displayed outside the drawing-room testify to the splendid figures who have sauntered down the steps of The Goring and round the corner to Buck House. These alone make The Goring worth a visit as, surprisingly, does the food.

If I were to judge solely by appearances, to look at the rejigged Edwardiana and the faintly bourgeois splendour of the dining-room, I would say that food at The Goring would be poorly executed and prissy: all pan-seared this, nestling on a bed of that, accompanied by a mousseline of the other and a jus of something unmentionable. Instead, it is wonderful.

Whoever cooks here really ought to be taken out of the kitchen, hoisted on the shoulders of an adoring crowd and paraded through the streets of London. This is good, classic, uncomplicated cooking, carried off without any unnecessary flourishes or furbelows.

Perhaps the reason I like The Goring so much is that it takes me back to a past that I have only ever glimpsed in films made in the Fifties. However, if my Welsh grandmother's cremation (and by this I mean her way with roast meats rather than her passage into the next world) was anything to go by, the food was foul - all Brown Windsor Soup and Woolton Pie. The Goring is as the past ought to have been, except that probably I, with my pink suit and matching lighter, and Roy, as a socialist, would not have been allowed in.

My smoked-trout salad with beetroot and horseradish crisps, was exactly what it said it was: the model of elegant simplicity. I am under the impression that when Anthony Blunt was unmasked as a spy, he was asked along to The Times for a spot of lunch where they ate smoked trout and drank a glass of white wine, a German Riesling, I believe. And now I can see why. My starter was just the sort of dish you might consume with a glass of light, yet steely Riesling from either the Saar or the Ruwer. Other starters included consomm?, terrine of foie gras, dressed crab and so on.

Main courses were equally comforting and even more patriotic: fricassee of rabbit with English mustard sauce, Chateaubriand from the Buccleuch Estate, roast best end of English lamb, noisettes of English lamb, Suffolk bacon and the inevitable Dover sole.