Alyn Williams At The Westbury: Serious Decadence, The Mayfair Way
It's a bad sign, or a good one, being this dazzled by the bread bowl at the start of a seven course dinner. We're trying to hit it with moderation, knowing what's to come. But it's a doomed effort. Little pats of intensely creamy butter and a head-sized loaf of bread — just smears and crumbs in minutes.
Everything about Alyn Williams at the Westbury breathes Mayfair. Not the old-guard hushed formality, though this is still very much a white tablecloths and napkin rings job. But there's a strong streak of decadence running through everything on the menu: unshowy, luxuriant ingredients with the richness or intensity dialled up.
This isn't a place to come to practise restraint. Not restraint of any sort: the prices are as steep as the food is deeply, intricately hedonistic. Thank god the eight courses that follow the bread bowl — and that's not counting the multiple canapés, delicately beautiful but powerfully rich, or the cheeseboard, a Vacherin-studded meal in itself — are ones worth pushing all sorts of boundaries for.
Star turns of the tasting menu include a vivid tower of beetroot, ricotta and smoked eel, a lobster tail made doubly rich with deep carrot and caramel flavours — and that cheeseboard, so alluring it's embarrassing not to be able to do it more justice. We try. We really try. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak and brimful. We've been utterly vanquished by Alyn Williams at the Westbury, but in the most pleasurably genteel, Mayfair-esque way possible.
Alyn Williams at the Westbury, 37 Conduit Street, W1S 2YF.
Last Updated 27 November 2018
