Quince

Thursday, June 23, 2011 - Staff encourage you to order a selection of 'small dishes', which makes sense as the portions are indeed small, but the high prices do not reflect this. So that fattoush salad costs 14.50, and nibble-sized starter portion of lamb boreks (pictured above, though ours came without the garnish of flowers) cost 7.50, or 1.50 per mouthful. But this is Green Park, not Green Lanes. It's worth paying the price for dishes such as the crisply fried squid, spiced with chilli, cumin and cardamom; or the tomato and fennel side salad which came with a dressing of pomegranate, tahini and mint.

Thursday, June 23, 2011 - Overall, the meal felt rather fussy, with all those sauces and dips, yet still a little repetitious in its flavours and spicing, distinctively sour. This is food that really goes better with cold beer and sunshine than with wine and an international hotel dining room - though the Mondavi Pinot Noir we had is a wine that can answer back assertively to almost any dish, to say the least. The final bill was 167.91. Ouch. You can have a very good time in an ocakbasi joint in Dalston or Finsbury for several nights running and pay less than that. Still, Quince is a bold venture and its Levantine style, in this grand hotel context, quite unusual.

Saturday, June 18, 2011 - Some, but not all, of the dishes we tried reflected the dazzle of the menu. A main-course salad which married burrata with pomegranate, tomatoes and chunks of bread was a winner, ditto a brace of spice-coated lamb cutlets, which disappeared in two bites. But I was mystified by my main course...Chatting to Silvena Rowe, she seemed determined to build the restaurant's reputation on food alone, rather than through association with the celebs who frequent the hotel. But for us, the food wasn't quite the draw we hoped it would be. 'It's basically tricked-out Turkish-ish,' concluded my friend.