‘The chocolate soufflé is too good for people’: Pavyllon at the Four Seasons Hotel, reviewed

One in, one out, as Rick says in Casablanca. Le Gavroche, which was the first restaurant in Britain to win three Michelin stars – and this was before Michelin stars indicated poor mental health in gifted chefs – closes in January, which is serious news in the land of London restaurants: a kind of Congress of Vienna with Michel Roux bowing out with the blood of infinite chickens on his knife. I don’t love Le Gavroche the way other critics do but I admire it, even if it means ‘urchin’, which is not witty when you consider its prices. There was a scandal involving staff’s tips going to management – an ongoing obscenity, though this one was resolved – and I also think that if you desire French food you could just go to France. It’s not far, at least in miles.

There is a Pavyllon in Paris, and Alléno brought 70 staff to London, like a travelling circus

You could also go to Pavyllon. French food can be irritating because it considers itself a pinnacle. It isn’t, of course. Food is subjective – I won’t go on about haute-cuisine crème eggs (I found them somewhere on the Aldwych long ago) just now. But it can be spectacular.

Pavyllon lives in the Four Seasons Hotel on Hamilton Place, next to the Playboy (Bunny) Club, which endured a ghoulish return ten years ago but is now thankfully dead again, though its Twitter account thinks it isn’t, and is offering a zombie Bunny feed as an act of hope and maybe resurrection. As ever when almost nude women are offered for money, I think: why can’t you just be charming?

The Four Seasons is an odd building built in 1970 for the international rich: a pale rectangle with vast windows to suck in the remnants of Hyde Park, which is again prostrate under its annual Winter Wonderland.