Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews STK London

issue 18 May 2013

STK is a steakhouse at the bottom of the ME Hotel on the Aldwych. (This is a real name for a real hotel. The cult of individualism has finally reached its apogee in the hotel sense, and, if you are curious, it looks like a piece of St Tropez that fell off and hit the Embankment.) The restaurant itself looks like a love ball, or a stupid person’s idea of what is sexy, or Hugh Hefner’s personal imago. It is dark and made of MDF in varying degrees of glisten and smear; if STK were a movie it would be Showgirls, in which the protagonist writhes like a dolphin in a swimming pool, chlorine tumbling off her breasts, because that is sexy if you are stupid, or a chlorine–philiac. (They must be out there.)

There are white leather booths and bead curtains and huge orchids and whisky bottles and everything is either purple or cream or black, like a freshly hewn bruise; in the Las Vegas branch they apparently have diamond cutlery.

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