I am mesmerised by the restaurants of Raffles London at the OWO (Old War Office) because war approaches and the Old War Office is now a stage set for food, floristry and linen. If this is civilisation – it isn’t really, but it thinks it is – who will protect it now? Will we even know if war has started – or care?
It was a fine building when I first came – I have reviewed its chilly Mediterranean food, its manic Italian and its tepid French – and it still is. Grand hotels exist to suppress time. It is a preening Edwardian palace with crazed plinths, over-pliant staff and ever sillier restaurants, today’s being the Drawing Room. It looks like how people who are not posh imagine posh country houses to be. It’s the English restaurant in Trump Tower without the defibrillator, or the more money-ed parts of Weybridge. It is all dark wood and red leather like a bench in the House of Lords, though there is a copy of The Brothers Karamazov on a shelf, and The Dog in Photography.
I am here for a themed second world war female spy tea called Secrets & Spies, which I booked while laughing. It is the patisserie-fication of the remembrance of war, and this is apt here. I wonder if the tea exists, though subconsciously, for women who think that eating is an act of war against yourself.
We ask for Earl Grey, and the waiter makes us smell it before it is infused for three, four or five minutes (a timer is provided). I feel vaguely captured when I am made to smell tea, but I give him this: it is very good tea. British tea is usually terrible, a feint, part of our mad grandiosity.
Then an asparagus and spring vegetable tart, which is small, cold and almost all pea. I will embrace the theme and say it is like being tortured by fascist peas. Then a vile group of sandwiches: chicken with curry emulsion (what?); ham on tomato bread; egg and cress; smoked salmon and horseradish. They are small, cold and weird. The chef does not understand that sandwiches cannot be posh, and the best sandwich – the thick sandwich – will not try. The cakes are madder than Hitler. There is a cake inspired by the GTSP, the sabotage watch ‘that won the war’, which I had never heard of until I ate a chocolate version of it. There are pastries named for Odette Sansom, the first woman to win the George Cross (elderflower, raspberry and yoghurt); Christine Granville, who was the inspiration for Vesper Lynd (strawberry, vanilla and ginger); Virginia Hall Goillot, our first woman in occupied France (chocolate, coffee, sable); Vera May Atkins, the inspiration for M (maple, pear, pecan).
We ask for Earl Grey, and the waiter makes us smell it before it is infused for three, four or five minutes
It’s weird, like eating the Imperial War Museum because you can’t think of anything else to do with it. It’s rare that a restaurant leaves me this confused: who is this for? Is it a sting, HM’s government being wary of women who take novelty teas? Is it feminism?
I leave the halls where, the restaurant blurb tells me, ‘some of the nation’s most important leaders, statesman and influencers have walked’. Was T.E. Lawrence an influencer and, if so, where is his memorial macaroon? I know it is coming, alongside an entire Madame Tussauds made of pastry. I went on a Karl Marx walking tour of Soho once: every place Marx lived and worked is now a pub, restaurant or cocktail lounge. Civilisation – what it really is – is drowning in food and drink, so make it good. This isn’t.
Raffles London at the OWO, 57 Whitehall, London SW1A 2BX; 020 3907 7500; raffles.com/london
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