Criminally good food: The Yard at Great Scotland Yard reviewed

The Yard is a defiantly themed restaurant in Hyatt’s new Great Scotland Yard Hotel, an Edwardian red-brick block which once housed the Central Detective Unit of the Metropolitan Police and its constituent darkness. You have to work hard to dispel that kind of horror, and Hyatt tries: the hotel is extraordinarily lush and over-styled, even for these mad days. The lobby, for instance, features a chair that is half rhinoceros but, in dreaming up the rhinoceros chair, Hyatt has invented a piece of furniture only a rhinoceros could appreciate or reach. The sofa opposite has three sequential cushions, which when placed together create a picture of a dachshund, and I can’t imagine anything more pointless.

There is a tea-room called The Parlour which looks like the set of Carry On Up the Khyber; a cocktail bar sprouted from Jay Gatsby’s head called The 40 Elephants (because 39 elephants have nothing like the same impact); a wood-panelled whisky bar behind an invisible door decorated with book spines and operated by button; monumental floristry; artworks by genuine convicts, which is mad; a judge’s wig behind glass; and most of a tree.