Dante Mayfair, Claridge’s, London W1: ‘Are chips ever worth £11? Probably not’ – restaurant review

The whole point of going to Claridge’s in the first place is to sweep in through the grand main hotel entrance

Dante Mayfair, inside Claridge’s on Brook Street in London, has been created, the hotel’s management says, to become “the living room of Mayfair”. It’s a charming idea: pop in, have a cuppa or a bowl of pappardelle bolognese, or lie about on the fancy sofas wearing elasticated tracksuit bottoms and slurping soft-serve with s’mores. No, sorry, I’ve gone too far: it’s nowhere near that informal.

Still, like many well-used living rooms, this one has been rearranged, redecorated and repurposed many times over the years. I’ve eaten fancy-schmancy Simon Rogan dinners here when it was Fera, as well as his table experience at Aulis during which venture capitalist “foodies” bored the pants off me over a 12-course meal in the kitchen itself. I’ve stared unmoved at Daniel Humm’s New York-style pomp at the short-lived Davies and Brook, and have visited several times since Claridge’s took matters in-house in the shape of a rather anonymous ye olde British brasserie.

Now I’m here for Dante, and we’re back in New York again, this time in the hands of Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson, with no named chef at all, although there’s absolutely definitely a man plinky-plonking his way through John Legend’s Ordinary People on the piano. Pride and Hudson are a husband-and-wife team from Sydney, Australia, who met at college, moved to New York and in 2015 bought Caffe Dante, an institution of a Greenwich Village coffee house that’s been open since 1915. By 2019, the place had been named the world’s best bar. The couple’s new space on Brook Street is a restaurant site in need of stability and comprehensible finery, as well as of caviar tarts with champagne pearls, shrimp cocktails and lobster linguine, and of caviar martinis and vintage or chocolate negronis.