The dessert restaurant, Hotel Café Royal – tried and tasted

Childhood favourites are given a grown-up going over at London's first dessert restaurant
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Not many things can seem new to the Hotel Café Royal, who've played host to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Liz Taylor and David Bowie, but now, for the first time in its 151-year history, the Regent Street icon is home to a female executive pastry chef, Sarah Barber.

The charming and disarmingly straightforward Barber has built a supper menu that couldn’t give a damn about traditional dining, and in doing so, is offering London an evening that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere in the capital.

Style and surrounds

Pudding is fun, so the Hotel is hosting Barber’s creations in its least formal room, the café. Wallpapered in cracked golden marble sheets, it looks out over Regent Street. On the walls are reminders of the place’s most famous patrons, and it smells faintly of chocolate and macaroons, and, usually, pleasingly expensive perfume.

On the menu

Choose between three and five courses: we settled on five because we’re greedy and, well, fancied more wine, but despite being puddings, servings are generous and filling: I left feeling like my kindred spirit might be Augustus Gloop. Perhaps Barber’s is Wonka*: her creations are miniature architectural feats to rival anything in the Chocolate Factory.

Bright creations: all the courses are beautifully put together

The “Jaffa Cake” comes hidden under edible toadstools sprouting from chocolate soil, the orangey cake below lying wrapped in a blanket of rich chocolate slashed with gold, dressed with jewels of gold popping candy. Elsewhere is a deconstructed snickers, more elegant than its namesake, served with a bubble of chocolate shake. They’re childhood treats, glitzed up for the five-star surroundings. Sweets these may be, but there are savoury choices too, including the Milky Way: goat’s cheese with beetroot served three ways, brightened with wild honey, or the flavoursome Chicken Foie with quince and brioche. These may not taste like typical puddings, but they at least do look like them. For a choice, or to have both sweet and savoury, plump for the Pick N’ Mix menu.

Barber has plans to freshen the menu for spring and summer with seasonal fruit stepping in for some of the chocolate.

*She calls the five-course menu Sarah in Wonderland, so I’m probably wrong.

Liquid Libations

Barber’s menu comes with well considered wine pairings, which, despite all largely being on the sweet side (a Gavi and a Prosecco are about as dry as it gets), take the flavours from the dish without adding another wash of sugar. There are some nice extras, too: a flowery gin cocktail, and Akashi-Tai Shiraume Ginjo Umeshu (plum-infused sake), which has a sticker on the bottle which looks like a Pokemon card, but tastes magnificent. However you cut it, booze wards off the sugar crash. It’s optional, naturally, but don’t be a damned fool.

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Hotel Café Royal, dessert restaurant: the lowdown

Final flavour: Your favourite part of the meal, for the whole meal.

At what cost? £26 – £42, depending on courses, wine pairing £14 – £20, again depending on courses.

Visit if you like: Sweet things. The Kensington Creperie, Bea’s of Bloomsbury and the Scandinavian Kitchen might sate your craving for sugar, but there isn’t anywhere else in London doing this.

Find it: 68 Regent St, W1B 4DY, hotelcaferoyal.com

Follow David Ellis on Twitter @dvh_ellis

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