I’ve always marvelled at those old photographs of air travel, where passengers are not cramped and delayed but free and easy on cream cushioned seats. There is a beautiful host in a fancy hat beside them serving cuts of lean pork from a trolley and topping up flutes of Champagne. It might be the Sixties: bouffant hair flirts dangerously with the top of the fuselage.
To drink at Brooklands, a restaurant and bar at the top floor of the Peninsula hotel off Hyde Park, is to reimagine a time bygone, when British aviation still revelled in the glamour of using cutlery 35,000ft above Lyon. French chef Claude Bosi is in charge. His dining room next door resembles something like an old first-class airport waiting room: chromatic; blue carpeted; sweeping windows through which to gaze at wheels skimming tarmac (though of course in this case, the London skyline).
