Jazz Lounge at the Wellesley 🌟🌟

It was in The December rain that we fought the half-drowned patrons of the Winter Wonderland to exit Hyde Park Corner station and cross Knightsbridge to enter the swanky Wellesley hotel.
To be fair, Knightsbridge is not our favourite places in London by any manner of means. It seems to be full of people with too much money and very little spark, or others aspiring to be like that.

Certainly the atmosphere at the Jazz lounge was aided by the live music. Though I was slightly disappointed that the piano stool remained unoccupied, we were treated to a pretty accomplished Jazz guitarist and a female cabaret singer who had a very sweet but voice. Anything she lacked in volume  was certainly helped by the fact that the room was pretty tiny. They lifted the evening with well known cabaret classics and even a few jazzed up Christmas numbers.
The atmosphere was not helped at all by the small room overcrowded by too many over-attentive waiting staff. It made me feel more like Prince Akeem of Zamunda than a welcome guest. I was only grateful that the toilets were a very long way from the lounge down a corridor and two flights of stairs, or I might not have escaped the Akem treatment. 

We were eating from the toptable £30per head three course set menu.

The food was certainly edible and quite pleasant but really nothing special at all. For example, it's always  a bonus to get a little amuse bouche before the meal, but when it is basically Philadelphia on toast, the bouche isn't very amused.

The starter was the best course: for me a marinated salmon that had a certain freshness to it that was like a day at the seaside on a plate. My wife had a salad that was better than anything she'd ever had at McDonald's. Perfectly edible but utterly imaginative.

I could bore you with the rest of the food, but why bother? It was fine but dull, and very very small. We left feeling like we'd gone to a reasonable intimate cabaret gig and had some very acceptable snacks. The wine certainly didn't redeem this. Very average wine for £14 per glass must have been at least a 700% markup. We were thankful for the small glass of Prosecco included in the deal..

Unlike the music, none of the food truly satisfied. The greatest disappointment was that in the intimacy of a potentially romantic Jazz lounge, the food certainly didn't sing.

Overall rating 🌟🌟 2/5

Starting an anonymous food blog.

My wife and I love watching Masterchef. We can't afford to eat out as much as we'd like, and so we try to improve our own cooking in order to eat well at home. 

We learn a lot about cooking from the instruction of world class chefs instructing the contestants; whether it be the crazy-posed-chaotic modern-art-posing-as-fine-dining of Massimo Bottura, or the Rolls-Royce-engine-precision pinpoint placement of tiny dots of  Olivier Limousin.

If such diversity inspires one to prepare food that looks amazing, and is perfectly constructed, the round that I love most in Masterchef is when the critics rip the food apart, either leaving it in disgust on the plate, or scraping every off it last morsel, complaining only that the portion could have been larger.

They like a plate that looks good, but insist that the looks of a plate are a promise: if the promise is broken, and great looking food proves distinctly average, then the promise is broken. 

I want to learn not only to cook great food, but to appreciate great food; this blog is largely for my own benefit to force me to think, enjoy appreciate and reflect, rather than just to gobble and go. 

Too many food critics are immediately recognisable. Ratatouille would have been a very different film if Anton Ego had been an anonymous critic. OK, the plot wouldn't have worked, but he would have received a more accurate depiction of what Gusteau's had truly become.

So, I never hope to be a Jay Rayner, Charles Campion, Kate Spicer or William Sitwell. But if my reviews are less refined than theirs, my experience might be more typical of others who might enjoy (or hate!) the restaurant without being recognised as a critic.

I intend to review every time I eat out, unless I'm returning to a restaurant. This means that you'll get reviews that are not all "fine dining". OK, I'll not review McDonalds, or KFC, but pretty much everything else!