London,

St Pancras Grand

Your rating

Click on a star to rate

Cuisine: British
45

St Pancras International, St. Pancras, NW1 2QP

Nearest Tube: King's Cross St Pancras

David Sexton's rating
Reader rating
 Add your review

Description: Located on the Upper Concourse alongside the Eurostar platform of St Pancras International, the St Pancras Grand is a stylish new restaurant that combines the romance of travel from a bygone era with a quintessentially British dining experience. Billy Reid, the Executive Chef has been behind some of the most famous names in the restaurant industry, including The Belvedere and The Vineyard at Stockcross, where he gained his first Michelin Star. Here at St Pancras Grand, Billy has created a splendid and very British style of menu, ranging from old-fashioned favourites to modern-day classics. In an interior modelled by Martin Brudnizki, the well-known designer also behind Scott's and The Ivy, there is also a small private dining room for private parties or meetings.

Phone: +44 2078709900
Website: http://www.searcys.co.uk/stpancrasgrand/

Open: Open Mon-Sun, 7am to midnight.

 

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
•  

Close X

Directions

 

Cheering blast from past at St Pancras Grand

 

British to the core: the food is just as you would hope and expect, served under a gilded ceiling

Look here too

• Bibendum review
• Saf review

One morning an elderly peer woke and rang for his valet. As the man entered, his master flung back the bedsheet. “Congratulations, your lordship,” the flunky said smoothly, “shall I fetch her ladyship?”

“No, no!” his master retorted. “The carriage. I’m taking this one into town.”

Here we have, in a nutshell, the problem facing St Pancras Grand, the big new restaurant that Searcy’s has just opened at the Eurostar terminal. If you arrived here with an appetite, would you rather not just get on the train and take it straight to the Continent, where they do these things better, than knock it on the head at home?

Perhaps to prosper, St Pancras Grand needs to become a destination in its own right, for Londoners with no intention of travelling any further — as the champagne bar has to some extent done?

There’s a problem, though. Unlike the open champagne bar, the restaurant is largely insulated from the glories of the station. You can just about hear the rumble of the Tube and the swish of the trains but you have no sense, once inside, of the soaring roof, one of the great spaces of London. You could be almost anywhere, in any big hotel. And though the food here is highly professional and not bad value, it’s not aiming to be exceptional or challenging.

What it is aiming at, as even a glance at the pleasantly understated menu reveals, is thorough-going Englishness. Thus English lobster, English green salad and British charcuterie are listed, alongside slightly more cryptic formulae, such as Constance Spry salad with salad cream, and Country Captain chicken curry.

So St Pancras Grand is where a curious French visitor might finally plunge into British cooking (no cuisine for us, thanks) at the very last minute — or else check it out on first arrival, before deciding whether or not to proceed any further into perfide Albion. They’ll get a misleading impression either way, because the food’s all pretty decent.

Potato and oyster soup (£6) was nicely bland, not too thick, basically a bonne femme without much leek, with a couple of oysters lurking in the bottom. They had evidently been added just before serving and had cooked through in the bowl, making them a little extra treat, rather than any addition to the flavour of the soup itself.

Constance Spry salad with salad cream (£4.75) turned out to be a straightforward English salad as people brought up in the Fifties always understood it to be — some Little Gem leaves, chopped cherry tomatoes, cress, spring onion, radish and finely diced cucumber, with some halves of hard-boiled egg, all jumbled up with a splash of what tasted like genuine, out-of-the-bottle salad cream of the kind the boy wanted but couldn’t get in Fawlty Towers (“The chef made that mayonnaise fresh this morning.” “That’s puke, that is.” Basil: “Well, at least it’s fresh puke.”)

St Pancras Grand, came the dawning realisation, is a deliberate exhibition of British food, one where you can eat the display. Everything here comes just as you would hope and expect. The fish and chips with mushy peas, the roast duck with apple sauce, the roast leg of Welsh lamb with mint jelly … Everything is also served fiercely hot, that great and pointless fetish of English diners.

St Pancras Grand fish pie (£11.75) again erred pleasingly on the side of soothing blandness, with a sloppy béchamel containing chunks of unremarkable salmon and white fish. It was nursery food at its best, uncomplicated by anything as exotic as a prawn or scallop, though some little bits of orange carrot could be detected.

It seemed an odd idea to mix up samphire with squeakily al dente mange-touts and green beans in a buttery side dish (£3.25) but it worked surprisingly well — the samphire’s dominant flavour being extended rather than lost by the other green vegetables.

The “executive chef” here is Billy Reid, previously at L’Escargot and the Belvedere in Holland Park. Billy’s Lancashire Hotpot (£14.50) proved a straightforward version of this easy dish, served in quite a small portion, baked in its own bowl. Again comforting and digestible rather than thrilling. The pickled red cabbage, served cold in its own little dish, was really unpleasantly overspiced, I thought — but then I’m somebody who reckons the right concentration of cloves to be about one to the Atlantic Ocean, if you really must...

To finish, there are lots of trad puds — English sherry trifle, lemon syllabub, Eton mess, apple crumble — and three strong British cheeses (Stilton, Cheddar, Lincolnshire Poacher) served with good thick, soft homemade oatcakes.

The short wine-list is well-designed but distinctly steep, with the cheapest bottles at £19. The basic Bordeaux on offer, Domaine Cheval-Blanc Signe at £22 for the grassy Semillon-dominated white, and £23 for the juicy, Merlot and Cabernet Franc-flavoured red, are good value, though.

The room is beautiful — with a gilded ceiling, first barrel-vaulted as you come in, then broadly coffered, with soft lighting and end mirrors creating a golden glow. There are enfolding banquettes, nice linen, skilful service. Most remarkable of all, it’s extremely quiet, without any background music, so you can hear a fork fall — certainly when the place is as empty as it has been so far since opening. But then this upper concourse at St Pancras, unlike the mall below, seems always remarkably calm, even museum-like, compared with the mêlée of other mainline stations.

Being both so quiet and so British, St Pancras Grand would be a great place to bring an oldie, especially one a bit deaf. It’s open from 7am to midnight too, offering breakfast, elevenses and afternoon tea. Perhaps that’s actually the best time to eat so Britishly? Maybe that senior peer might just like to stop off for a little restorative on his way home...

Fay Maschler is away.

Click here for great restaurant offers

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

Book Online

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter