Food not thought at Foliage

This review was first published in August 2000

Smart restaurants are all beginning to look the same. There is a creeping contemporary orthodoxy about the way they are designed. When one steps into a smart dining-room to be relieved of around 50 quid a head for supper, increasingly one enters an environment that could be anywhere from Miami to Munich, Houston to Hong Kong, Los Angeles to London.

Foliage (pronounced folly-aarj), the new fine dining bit of the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park hotel, just happens to be in London. From the look of it, it could be anywhere in the civilised, sorry, make that affluent, world.

The Hyde Park used to be a handsome but slightly dowdy, late 19th-century dreadnought of a hotel. I believe it started life as flats for Guards officers but soon transformed itself into an upmarket hotel with quite unbeatable views across the park.

Then in the Nineties it became the location of Marco Pierre White's eponymous landmark restaurant, and then after the dust settled on the corporate battlefield that had been the takeover of Forte, the Hyde Park found itself under the ownership of the Mandarin Group.

The hotel closed and was refurbished. The vast hotel restaurant was chopped about to create two restaurants of which Foliage is one.

Judging by appearances - my stock in trade - I did not expect to be impressed. It is the apotheosis of identikit modernity: it looks like David Collins, but is in fact Adam Tihany - the American Collins. The bar is an uneasy cross between Monte's (Mr Tihany's other great contribution to London restaurant design) and the bar at an Ian Schrager hotel. It captures neither the wood-panelled comfort and pleasing if sham grandeur of the former, nor the sheer cheerful exuberant brashness of the latter.

The two good things about the design are the zebra-covered ottoman and the transparent humidor that stands in one nook like a giant nicotine-fuelled Tardis waiting for someone to order a cigar.

It speaks a language the modern, international, time-poor, cash-rich, nouveau riche, label-literate, DKNY/LV/D&G-clad sophisticate understands. And, as such, the Mandarin has pitched it perfectly - the place was crammed and even though it was a Tuesday night, I had to wait for a cancellation before I could be slotted in on a corner table.

My initial dismay at how a nice room had been wrecked was overcome by the signature Mandarin service. The Ritz and the Connaught are still my two favourite hotel dining-rooms, but for sheer culinary accomplishment and all-over restaurant excellence, Foliage is up there with Nobu.

The style of cooking at Foliage is modern French, but it does not deserve to be pigeonholed by such a mediocre term. It is quite simply superb. Mrs Foulkes said that it was the best food of this type she had tried since we visited Le Gavroche. And if such a thing as a regular reader of this column exists, then he or she will remember how much I raved about that.

This is modern civilised dining at its best. Poached Scottish lobster, vinaigrette of crab, confit tomatoes and caviar dressing; grilled fillets of red mullet, Proven?ale vegetables, confit of ratte potatoes, new season asparagus; pineapple tarte Tatin, Tahitian vanilla yoghurt sorbet all passed in a wonderful symphony of flavour, interspersed with little solos like the amuse-gueule of haddock and the pre-pudding, a tiny cr?me br?l?e with a black cherry. Mrs Foulkes ate three small dollops of a foie gras followed by saddle of Welsh lamb and could not find words adequate to express her delight. There are times when you know you are eating world-class food and this was one of them.