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Description: With its "stunning" cooking -- from the ex-head chef of the River Café -- this Mayfair newcomer deserves to be hailed as one of London's foremost Italians; it's blighted, though, by appallingly "sterile" décor -- "a bit like an airport lounge".
Food: 
Service:
Ambience: 
Phone: 020 7409 3131
Website: http://www.theorandall.com
Open: Mon - Fri 12pm - 3pm & 6pm - 11pm
Sat 6pm - 11pm
Dress code: None
Good for: Business, Good food, Ambience.
Payment options: All major cards accepted
Theo Randall's culinary artistry is let down by The InterContinental's costly but dull refurb
Who knew a veal chop could be so beautiful? It sits on the plate oozing fragrant juices, its outside scarred with the fierce heat of the chargrill, its insides the perfect, palest pink of babies' ears. It tastes magnificent, too: Limousin, milk-fed meat, melting and delicate, with just a suggestion of the beef it could have grown up to be.
Slicked over it is some tastebud-tumescing salsa verde and the vivid, grassy green of bloody good olive oil. Liquoricey fennel and earthy chard are ideal playmates. A quarter of lemon - a pleasingly misshapen beast, uneconomically flown in from Amalfi - adds the final spritz to one of the best meat dishes I've had in recent memory.
But that's the main event. Before this super-chop arrives, we've had plenty more to drool over. Heck, even bread is memorable: chewy sourdough, quick-frazzled and soaked with more of that oil until it's a toasty, smoky dish in itself. It comes with little, greyish olives that pack a flavour punch and a sweet, lusciously lactic buffalo mozzarella that tastes as though it has been made moments earlier.
Fritto misto, with batter so crisp it rustles, is an Italian trat standard taken to gorgeous lengths: two sage leaves sandwich a sliver of anchovy; violet artichokes add seasonal heft; the squid gives way to the teeth in the most satisfactory way.
There's eel (sadly not British but Dutch) of velvety, subtle smokiness, served with weeny beets tasting of wintry loam on their own peppery leaves. And there are agnolotti, where pasta has achieved a finely tuned balance between paper-thin delicacy and al dente, stuffed with the gameyness of long-stewed veal, partridge, pancetta and Parmesan and bathed simply in good butter.
Only small details blot the copybook: a seafood risotto that relies too heavily on luxury ingredients such as lobster and scallops and not enough on depth of flavour; it was also cooked about, oh, 45 seconds too long. And the cool, silky trembliness of a rich pannacotta could have happily lived without its bullying wodge of claggy chestnut puree. Loved the crunch of the scattered hazelnut croquante, though.
OK, OK, I hear you. Stop getting off on your food porn and tell us about the actual restaurant. Truth is, as you can probably tell, I'm trying to put it off. Because, alas, all this fantastic food is to be had in an environment with about as much personality as a lowfat, carb-free cheeseburger, no fries, hold the mustard. It's like the 'fayn dayning' section of an airport hotel.
The InterContinental's refurb has cost a reputed £60million - to paraphrase the divine Dolly Parton, it costs a hell of a lot of money to look this dull. You walk through a lobby done out in best international hotel style - red plush, supersized chandeliers - to a long, windowless room tricked out in shades of brown.
The layout seems carefully designed so that there's no such thing as a bad table; it's just that there's no such thing as a good one either. Columns obscure your view of the other diners; by craning my neck I managed to make out a bunch of wealthy tourists, many accessorised by bored-looking children.
Why on Earth has Theo Randall landed himself here? And who is he anyway? A culinary force to be reckoned with, that's who. He was head chef and partner at The River Cafe, the one who wasn't Ruth Rogers or Rose Gray. This was the guy at the actual coalface; it was he who won Michelins and plaudits as the best Italian restaurant in Europe - and, yes, that included Italy.
Many dishes on his twice-daily-changing menu will be familiar to those lucky enough - and rich enough - to have eaten there. Yep, that veal, those agnolotti, the famous Chocolate Nemesis.
So it's perfectly understandable that after years languishing in the long shadows cast by Rose and Ruthie, he yearned for his moment in the limelight. And the hotel bosses clearly cast an eye over the current hotel trends (finally - its previous posh restaurant, Le Souffle, was a fossil) and thought they'd better get themselves a Name over the restaurant door. But in each case, the players have stiffed themselves.
Randall has an environment that sucks some of the joy out of his glorious, rustic, Tuscan-flavoured cooking. And the InterContinental gets a chef who, despite his background and undeniable artistry, hasn't done nearly enough trumpetblowing or telly-posturing to have the kind of profile that wheels in the chef groupies.
Anyway, let's charge up our credit cards - this deceptively simple stuff does not come cheap - and shut our eyes to the room. Because, shallow I may be, but I'd eat Randall's food anywhere you care to plonk me.
A meal for two with wine, water and service costs about £140. Theo Randall at The InterContinental, 1 Hamilton Place, Park Lane W1. Tel: 020 7318 8747. Tube: Hyde Park Corner
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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