New London hotel: 1 Hotel Mayfair’s new Tom Sellers restaurant is Michelin star worthy
Inside the 1 Hotel Mayfair, where Tom Sellers, the chef behind twice-Michelin-starred Restaurant Story, has opened his newest eatery. The hotel is one of the openings of the year, and focuses on sustainability in its design and ethos. Does the theme work or feel like a lecture? Adam Bloodworth checks in
At the newly-opened 1 Hotel Mayfair, a mass of ferns has been intricately designed to hang from the ceiling, forming a chandelier as big as the hotel entrance. It’s wide, spiralling and immersive, like peering into an aeroplane’s jet engine. Made of dozens of live plants that dangle metres below it, it is lowered twice a week for watering, a technical feat on par with creating it in the first place. You have to walk under it to get into the hotel, the experience genuinely feeling a bit like walking into a rainforest. (I said a bit.)
It is the first of many provocative art pieces made from nature that make this new hotel’s foyer stand out. In place of typical artwork, a hunk of splintered, untreated wood is the first thing you see in the hotel’s doorway. Behind glass, it questions the value of artwork, what it can bring to a space like a lobby. Door handles are made of wiry, meandering pieces of driftwood, and metres away in the lounge, a table comprises dozens of small upturned branches.
Defining a hotel around sustainability seems not only didactic but trite. These days, we expect sustainable credentials to be a given where we eat and sleep, rather than something to shout about. Partially the 1 Hotel group are shouting because they’re American, I’d suspect, and that’s what Americans do, but to be fair, the hotel does also boast a fresh way into the sustainability conversation.
The lobby and rooms are beautiful homages to nature, and across the entire hotel, some 1,300 individual plants have bedded in to their new home. Over 200 plant species feature; there is even a live wall of moss in my room, and plants peek out of brickwork in even the most ordinary parts of the building, like on the way downstairs to the restaurant loos. I’m not sure it’s going to make people act more sustainably, but all the plants do create a sense of calm that’s unique to the London hotel scene.
It’s a pleasant space to inhabit for a while. The design, by G.A Group in partnership with SH Hotels & Resorts, brings an impressively contemporary feel to the rooms, restaurants and public spaces. Mostly, the design feels in line with the ingenuity of the nature everywhere vibe: smart furnishings clash with wooden fixtures and fittings, often in the shape that they fell to the forest floor. It’s a strange mixture of ostentatiousness and earthiness that could only be dreamed up by a group that have already opened a handful of hotels in America.
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My room was furnished with the sort of detail you don’t often find. A water tap is somewhat randomly in the middle of the room, next to an elaborate mini bar, but it’s a fun design flourish you didn’t think you needed, but I was surprised by how convenient a tap in the middle of a room is. There are interesting textural touches, including woven material on the walls and a striking white rug, all playing on the theme of beige, but not in a dull way, in a way that shows how subtle it that can be to play with one tone. The bed is comfortable; the towels carry the sort of smell only towels in Mayfair could.
There are a few flaws: I bumped my head into the lamp in my room twice from where it was hanging, four feet from the floor in the mini lounge area. And it feels incongruous to talk about sustainability when in the restaurant, Dovetale by Tom Sellers, the choice way of serving Tabasco is in a tiny bottle with barely enough to last across four oysters, rather than in a longer-lasting jar. (Tabasco famously sell huge glass bottles of their sauce.)
Tom Sellers’ new restaurant Dovetale
But that is the only questionable thing about Tom Sellers’ new restaurant, Dovetale, an exciting proposition that not only reminds you why Sellers has two Michelin stars at his other place, Restaurant Story, but positively slaps you in the chops, again and again, with ingenuity.
Dishes arrive gorgeously crafted, some with the intricate beauty of paintings, like the punchy ratatouille, a signature of Sellers, with its circles of thinly sliced tomatoes arranged in circles, like cascading pennies crushed together in a beachfront slot machine. Someone, almost certainly not Sellers, spent hours crafting this. Or the dressed Cornish crab that was served in such a perfect circle against a backdrop of egg cubes that it reminded me of the pleasing moment when you remove masking tape from a painted wall, revealing the crisp line where both colours meet.
Sellers has a God given talent for creating dishes that are partially familiar but then yank you in a surprising direction. Orkney scallops are pepped up with slices of Amalfi lemon, the sharpness brought down a peg by an oil dressing that finds harmony between the fish and citrus. But the chunks of scallop were just a little too thin to properly taste.
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It was only a small thing. The dishes kept coming. A carpaccio of Wagyu beef was served with beef fat chips to wrap the steak around, which was as fun as it sounds and then a little bit more fun on top. Oh, and the combination tasted heavenly. Carpaccio of artichoke with black truffle dressing was pretty like the ratatouille, a statement of how inventive methods of preparation can be dreamed up for vegetables too. Braised cuttlefish in tomatoes and rosemary had the fresh but comforting zing of a dish homemade by an Italian nonna who has made this same meal every day of her life.
To the mains, and Dover sole with cauliflower, grapes and tarragon was an exercise in subtlety and created another colourful wash on the plate that looked so frustratingly perfect it could have sat for its own self portrait. Pink roasted lamb was exquisitely cooked, with gentle yogurt and wild capers and the exciting addition of charred lettuce for an intriguing smoky edge.
There’s no way of writing about Sellers without talking about his trademark bad boy reputation. I ask one staff member if he’s been exhibiting his notorious acerbic nature – to put it politely – in the kitchen. “He is a chef,” they say. I don’t entirely know what that means, but I do know one thing: he is a chef who, with Dovetale, should be well on his way to a third Michelin star.
Book Dovetale online as well as rooms at the 1 Hotel Mayfair