Midway through dinner at Mauro Colagreco, the shining flagship at the head of Raffles London’s fearsome armada of all-new food and beverage options, our server invoked the idea of lively, familial warmth. “This service,” he intoned, setting down a crown of tear-and-share loaf, “is really all about breaking bread, and something that symbolises the conviviality of coming together for a feast”.
I looked around at the starched, grandly corniced parlour room (nestled beneath hotel rooms that start at £1,100 a night); the hulking battle-cruiser of a champagne trolley doling out circa £30 glasses of fizz; the waistcoated staff moving through the unpeopled quiet of a space my pal had already compared to his nan’s house. And then, on an evening notably low on laughs and levity, I allowed myself a little smile.
Because, honestly, while there are a great many words you could use to describe this place — a first UK restaurant from the Argentina-born founding chef of three Michelin-starred Rivieran gastro-temple Mirazur — I do not know if “convivial” is even close to being one of them. Mauro Colagreco at Raffles London is artful, luxurious and occasionally astounds with its fine-hewn, technical intricacy. But it is also a slightly airless and determinedly cerebral experience that, for those of us who have Monzo cards rather than Coutts accounts, ends with what may be one of the capital’s most traumatising bills.
The impact of the setting can’t be disputed. Singaporean luxury hotelier Raffles’ £1.4 billion overhaul of the Grade II-listed Old War Office in Whitehall is perhaps the splashiest hospitality launch of an unusually splashy autumn: a municipal palazzo of buffed marble columns, subterranean bars and no fewer than nine new places to eat and drink.
Colagreco’s eponymous space is the biggest in stature but aims for something atmospherically humble — Argentine ballads trill from the stereo. We went for the £110, three-course a la carte (there is a £165 five-courser and a £60 set lunch) and, soon, ornate, all-vegetarian canapés were set down — jolting little lavender and hibiscus tartlets and, most memorably, a pair of heady, brittle celeriac tacos. If this was an introduction to Colagreco and head chef Leonel Aguirre’s emphasis shift to the glories of the plant kingdom, then the starters showed the good and bad of this approach. A scallop and broccoli dish was sublime: thin shavings of cruciferous stalk and a miso-spiked green goo poured over buttery, warm coco beans and sweet lobes of confit bivalve.
It’s hard to square the slightly antiseptic night my pal and I had with a bill that almost nudged £400
However, a gathering of fennel, primed with a wincing hit of mackerel sashimi, crème fraîche and cucumber aquachile, lost the fish in the mix of its forceful astringency. Then came “squash” (a sensible trousers chicken dish largely memorable for a fairy-sized tangle of butternut squash noodles in yellow curry sauce), “radicchio” (sensuously wilted bitter leaves alongside a glistening beetroot sauce and impeccably cooked venison) and puddings: a sculptural, immaculate puffed millet and chocolate flower, plus a sweet potato tarte tatin that felt more like a provocation than a climactic piece of sugary indulgence.
I don’t think you can credibly dispute that this is the kind of high-calibre execution that costs a premium. Or that in isolation the food is perhaps worth four stars. Yet it is hard to square the slightly antiseptic night my pal Mark and I had — an evening of cautiously limiting ourselves to a few glasses of the cheapest wines — with a bill that somehow, with its added 15 per cent service charge, almost nudged £400.
Colagreco’s entry into London dining is unquestionably a landmark moment; it will delight the super rich and diners canny enough to get someone else to pay. Even so, I am happy to fashion myself a culinary dunce’s cap and die on the hill of this truth: for those of us who value fun, spiritedness and surprise in a restaurant, who crave actual conviviality rather than a signposted gesture towards it, it doesn’t come close to fully justifying the pure, vertiginous madness of its prices.
