What's in a name?

It's hard to know where the ebbs and flows of the economic tide are taking us, but if you were to use riverside property developments as an indicator, you'd have to say that we are in the middle of boom time.

Another indication of things looking good on the tourist front could be the opening of the Riverbank Park Plaza Hotel, a new 394-room luxury hotel where rooms start at £225 per night, rising to £350 for a suite overlooking the river.

This impressive building is close to the MI6 HQ and offers handsome views across the river towards the Palace Of Westminster.

A spacious, minimalist lobby leads you into the attractive, ultra-modern, Philippe Starck-influenced design of the Mediterranean-Asian (Mediter-Asian, to you and me) restaurant and lounge bar.

The name Chino Latino suggested to me that this place might belong to the ersatz sub-genre of clattering cantina Tex-Mex operations, but I arrived to find a seriously upmarket bar, with generously spaced, low-slung leather furnishings arranged into small clusters and boothed areas.

A Mondrian-style, floor-to-ceiling glass wall, à la Mandarin Oriental hotel, hides the bar area and staff disappear through a doorway to prepare the drinks away from the prying eyes of me and my three friends from the drinks industry. This is a shame as I like to watch staff making my drinks and enjoy the spectacle of an able bartender doing his or her best with a cocktail shaker.

When our drinks arrived - after an age of waiting - my friend Tim rejected his Green Temple on the basis that he couldn't taste any alcohol.

This brings to mind the current, worrying trend towards over-flavouring cocktails in bars. I believe alcohol should be apparent on the palate, not least to remind us that we are consuming a mind-altering substance.

To be fair to whoever made the Green Temple, the combined ingredients of cucumber, kiwi and apple juice are probably just too much for a 50ml shot of vodka, particularly when served in extremely large glasses, as they are. But I also rejected a Lychee Martini on the same issue of flavour, and if you can't taste the alcohol in a Martini then you have to assume that there is little or no alcohol present.

A manager of some description came to our table to discuss the matter, and I explained the problem in what I thought was a pleasant manner - well, as pleasant as I always am after a couple of fruit juices. His brave riposte, poor lamb, was to embark on a lecture covering the intricacies of cocktails and the myriad of possible flavours, and he concluded by asking us if we'd ever been to Hakkasan. I paid my bill and left.

Chino Latino
Riverbank Park Plaza Hotel, 18 Albert Embankment, SE1