Too perfect for Instagram: Cédric Grolet at the Berkeley reviewed

The Cédric Grolet at the Berkeley lives in the shiniest hotel in Knightsbridge, though I prefer the Mandarin Oriental, because it looks like the crown of a toppling king: no matter what they spend on it, it seems in danger of falling into Hyde Park. The Berkeley operates a pass the parcel for restaurants and, for now, Cédric Grolet (the World’s Best Pastry Chef 2017) has it.

The Berkeley has a fondness for mad teas, which is, by itself, a cognitive dissonance, as I haven’t seen a fat person in Knightsbridge since the 1990s: perhaps they are all dead. I have eaten a shoe biscuit here during London Fashion Week because some women like to eat shoes and there is nothing wrong with that.

This is, at least partly, a ludicrous bakery, as well as a fable that tells us that no mandarin is as good as a real mandarin, and the act of trying to make a fake mandarin when a real one is better is something pitiable. It is not perfect for Instagram, which is the obvious remark. It is too perfect for Instagram. It makes Instagram look like the oil-rig graveyard near Hartlepool.

The window on to Knightsbridge is filled with flowers, maybe poppies, maybe silk: Dorothy’s poppies blowing on the A4. There are pictures of pastries doing things they should not: being bicycle wheels, for instance, or sitting on a carpet, which they match. Anything can be a cake is the message here: cake can save you. But it is performative. The floor of the kitchen is stone fish-scales; the fridges are mirrors. On the counter the cakes sit under glass domes like sculptures: a fake mango, a fake apple, a fake fried egg (if it is meant to be a fried egg).