Exquisite British crowd-pleasers at eye-watering prices – this is a place that lends itself to letting go
Are fish and chips ever worth £32.50? This is possibly the most pertinent question about chef Tom Kerridge’s glitzy new dining room in the 283-room, five-star Corinthia Hotel near Whitehall in London. So let’s just cut to the chase. What if I told you the fish is the finest, freshest, most ethical brill cocooned in a batter so crisp, it feels like a masterclass in whipping and dipping. Oh, and you eat the fish while Kerridge himself, the man off the telly, ambles jovially around his 90-cover fiefdom in chef’s whites.
Plus, this fish arrives with a little pot of chips. Say, around 12 chips in all, but triple-cooked with an ethereal, golden shimmer, so that each one feels like a little earnest task at hand. A delicious task, yes, but these are not flippantly scoffed chips like the gargantuan, soft, soggy and fragrant pile you unwrap from the local chippy, stinking gloriously of malt, newsprint and Friday night. No, these are special, once-in-a-lifetime chips flanked by three delicate schooners of chunky tartare, pease pudding and the Matson spiced sauce previously seen at Kerridge’s two Michelin-starred Buckinghamshire pub, The Hand and Flowers, and which I’ll be so bold as to identify as a prim riff on the slightly radioactive but entirely delicious chip-shop curry sauce that the British, myself included, so love. Matson sauce, however, is a gentle tickle of your tastebuds, rather than a full-on, tonsil-jiggling snog.
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