Polo leaves unpleasant taste

She is probably called Deirdre and undoubtedly hails from somewhere like Deptford. Deirdre Deptford looked content in her decumbent state at the bar, clearing the debris from between the gaps in her teeth with a door key.

Harry Hackney was sitting at one of the tables comparing the shininess of his suit with his mate Barry Brockley. Meanwhile, Giertruda Gdansk was having a bit of a crisis and was screaming what might have been Polish obscenities down her mobile phone as she paced the room for all to hear.

It took me a second or two to work out that all the above were members of staff at the new Polo bar in the nearly-finished-being-refurbished Westbury Hotel. In fact, there were so many more staff hanging around I wondered if the sole purpose of their employment was to make the place look busy. People don't really get paid to loll around in bars all day, do they?

I could tell they were staff because they were all liveried up, which is the fashion for old-fashioned hotels but decidedly unfashionable for contemporary hotels that have aspirations to the cosmopolitan. The Polo, I am reliably informed, is 'destined again to be one of London's leading destination bars', or so says the press release.

To help The Polo achieve this, they've spent £1 million on the place. Seems a lot for a room that now looks like the lounge of an old folks' home - stand-alone handrails, conference-style furniture, strings of glass beads decorating the windows - where you'd expect the prevailing aroma to be of talcum powder and Anusol.

The drinks. Given this place's oblique proximity to businesses at the centre of London's rag trade, drinks have been given sartorial names under the sections Pret A Porter (although the drinks aren't pre-made), Classic Cut and Haute Couture. I ordered an Off The Cuff - a Martini of Plymouth Gin with passion fruit and lychee. It was decent enough, but £9 is too high a price for a cocktail in an environment as dreary as this. And long cocktails are charged at a whopping £12, for what are little more than satisfactory alco-fruit fusions.

Bottled beers are £4 and small bottles of Hildon mineral water £3.50. A 12.5 per cent service charge is added to your bill and there is a minimum spend of £12.50 per person.

Food is served all day and includes an American or English breakfast (£13.50), burgers and club sandwiches (£14.50) and afternoon tea at an impossibly high £18.50. Bowls of soup are charged at £6.50.

Hotel bars have never been traditionally cheap but, in recent years, they've been trying to attract new punters through value-for-money deals and/or superior and trendy surroundings. The Polo fails on both of the above and badly so.

For the first time ever I'm awarding zero stars to this lamentable operation on the basis that I can't think of a single person outside of a prison cell who would benefit by going there.

The Polo Bar
New Bond Street, W1S 2YF