Room With A View

In honour of Dave and Octavia's (almost) last night in town before becoming suburbanites, David and I went out for dinner with them to the recently-opened Galvin at Windows in what used to be the Windows on the World restaurant in the Hilton on Park Lane.

Yesterday morning I was expecting the experience to be somewhat minimised by miserable weather (what's the point of being on the 28th floor if you can't see anything?) but a glowing review of the place by the always dependable Fay Maschler at least suggested that the food was going to be good. As it turned out, yesterday afternoon was suddenly warm and clear, and the view was about as good as you could hope.

Quick tip if you ever go - don't plan on spending time having a drink in the bar first. It's full of people talking on mobile phones, smoking cigars and generally being conspicuous consumers, and the service is diabolical. David and I got there at 8.30 and settled into a corner on a couple of sofas. The guy in charge then very obviously sent over a waitress to make sure we were going to be a larger party and weren't hogging more space than we should (even though it was the only free space when we'd got there). David then asked for the cocktail list, which they apparently thought we only wanted to read and not order from, as we were then forgotten about for fifteen minutes until Dave and Octavia arrived. Once they then finally came to take the drink order we were then left waiting over another fifteen minutes for the things to arrive.

So avoid the bar, go straight into the restaurant and you won't regret it - the food was superb, the service great, and the evening thoroughly enjoyable. A slight marring at the end when their system went down and they couldn't provide us with the bill for a while was really no one's fault, and you've got to love a French waiter who can take the piss out of himself by apologising that his French accent isn't strong enough and then deliberately overdoing it to make up :-)

Posted on May 26, 2006 07:06 AM

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