Just the ticket

At BRASSERIE MAX in the Covent Garden Hotel, a dry martini cost £8.50 and tasted of melted "dirty" ice. Ice can easily absorb flavours from where it has been stored and then infuse drinks with a brackish flavour.

For instructions regarding making the perfect dry martini, and avoiding hazards like the above, consult the cocktails chapter in Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories: Second Helpings (Macmillan £20). I like his idea of first sloshing the ice with vermouth and then pouring the vermouth away before using that scantily painted ice for the cocktail.

Disappointment was compounded when we discovered that taking drinks into the hotel's private cinema, where we had booked seats to see Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Funny Face, was not permitted. This was not for licensing reasons but apparently to protect the chairs which are upholstered in stone-coloured leather. Why not at least allow white wine, gin and vodka? I am sure it would increase the popularity of the hotel's Saturday and Sunday night film "club" where a different film is shown every Saturday in Covent Garden and every Sunday at its sister hotel in Charlotte Street.

The £30 price of a ticket includes a three-course meal in the respective brasseries.

Funny Face was as wistfully enchanting as ever and afterwards at Brasserie Max we were able to contrast and compare the reality of American tourists in London with the fantasy of Americans in Paris. We were handed a long a la carte menu only to have it whisked away and replaced with the club menu of four choices in each of the three courses. Fred chose spinach-and-wildmushroom soup. Audrey took the crispy beef and noodle salad with cashew-nutandcoriander dip. Both dishes were a bit ordinary but serviceable enough at 10pm.

In the main course Audrey ate daintily the corn-fed chicken breast with chorizo, chick peas and grilled red onion, while Fred told Audrey she would have made a better job of cooking the free-range loin of pork with roasted pumpkin and a scallion and Masala (sic) jus than the kitchen managed. Slices of cheese with fig-and-walnut chutney, and a delicious chocolate brownie with Cornish clotted cream, were chosen for dessert.

Staff at Brasserie Max, although oddly accident-prone, are willing and friendly. A Christmas outing you might want to consider is a viewing of It's A Wonderful Life on 14 December or White Christmas on 21 December, both heart-warming holiday films. Dinner can be before or after the movie or even divided by it.