The torment of a tasting menu: Hélène Darroze at the Connaught reviewed

The Connaught Hotel’s formal dining room was always, to me, a place of childish myth; more comforting for being mythical. I am certain it is the dining room in Judith Krantz’s novel Princess Daisy, to which a Russian prince takes his daughter in the 1970s. In this tableau you find Robert Maxwell, Margaret Thatcher and people willing to pay for newspapers.

I had, in a crowded field, my best ever celebrity encounter here, with the Netanyahus, in what used to be the breakfast room overlooking Carlos Place. ‘Shalom,’ I said, thrilling to the Waspy-ness we were subverting with our very presence. (I meant it. I meant it more than they did. I think that is clear.) ‘Shalom,’ Mrs Netanyahu said back. That was it.

But the Connaught has in recent years succumbed, like an illness, to renovation, and I do not recognise the hotel I once loved. The faded chintzes are gone. The American liberals have gone, possibly with the chintzes. Alec Guinness has gone, which, though lamentable, is not really the Connaught’s fault. They could hardly keep his corpse in the hallway; though they could at least have a hologram.

As part of this renovation without end we have a new ‘casual’ restaurant in Jean-Georges at the Connaught, which is a fine place to throw pink champagne down a mother. We have a new ice-pink Patisserie and a new Connaught Grill, which looks like a very sleek woodman’s hut filled with people who could not find an axe in a woodshop, and is now mysteriously closed, most likely from lack of staff (though of Brexit I will not speak here. It’s Christmas). There is nowhere to hide in this hotel now, and hotels need places to hide; at their best, they are nothing more than that. It seems, rather, to have become a very excitable food court.