The apex of civilisation: the Connaught Grill reviewed

A ghost review, now, of a ghost restaurant: the Connaught Grill, which is yet to reopen after pandemic shuttered its renovated self, which opened only in January this year. Cut off at the knees then; or strangled at birth. It feels apt to review something thwarted. I heard it may reopen for Halloween. I hope it does. We need variety in restaurants: to save the art.

I never went to the Grill’s previous incarnation of 1955 to 2000, when it was famous for hosting Michael Caine and Princess Diana (I pull these out at random, but I could have pulled out Lulu and Nicolae Ceausescu) and for resisting nouvelle cuisine in favour of French cuisine, but I did not have to. I knew it from the smell of Jeffrey Archer novels and the TV adaptation of Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy: the dining room of a gilded life, and untouchable, particularly when you do touch it and it duly melts away. It was a performative ideal, not a dining room; and the ideal was more powerful and interesting than the dining room itself. This is how it should be: the possibilities of wealth are the narcotic; and that is why tycoons — the 1980s phrasing is deliberate — go mad. The truth is more boring, smaller, and more paranoid.

I am very fond of the Connaught Hotel, which is an English hotel run like a German-Swiss hotel, and I understand why I am fond of it: in a great hotel you are a happy child, because all your needs are met. That is why I checked in to the chintz attic on so many lonely birthdays; and that is why I am always happy here, no matter the ruin beyond.

Here, then, was the new Grill, after its two decades of slumber, awoken not with a prince’s slurp, but by the appetite of the international rich to live and dine in London.