Restaurants – Galvin at Windows Review
Words: Violet
Galvin at Windows perches on the top floor of what must be the ritziest Hilton in the world. The building is like a giant Palm Springs apartment block that’s somehow found itself marooned on a Central London traffic junction. It was one of the tallest buildings in London when it opened, and while it may not be the Shard, it’s still pretty bloody towering.
But you know the cliché: you pay for a view. Name me five good, affordable skyscraper restaurants and I’ll change my name to Norman Foster. Thus it was that my extremely fussy chum Rufus and I stepped into the lift of the Hilton Tower with extremely low expectations. ‘You can feel a tenner added to the bill with every floor,’ Rufus said, ‘This is going to be naff.’
The lift doors sprang open and we faced a view that left us slack jawed as starstruck teenagers. We stood there, staring at the carpet of London that stretched below is in silence for probably thirty seconds before a waiter thrust glasses of champagne into our limp hands. Still dazed, we were led to a table overlooking Buckingham Palace, its enormous garden an ink stain on a tapestry of halogen light.
So far Rufus had been wrong – despite being a good 100 metres above the Hyde Park Corner Roundabout, the room felt neither jet-trash tacky nor scarily formal. And stone me was the house champagne good. It was hard to square the solid and balanced taste with its voluptuous body – bubbles slunk louchely over the tongue like the Caramel Bunny on the pull.
A really fantastic sommelier presented Rufus with a glass of South African viognier (‘this is a serious wine,’ apparently) and me with a really delicate but still punchy Sauvignon Blanc from the village of Pessac, outside Bordeaux. But before we’d had even a moment to talk about them in flowery terms we didn’t entirely understand, our starters turned up. Blimey. Wow.
Rufus’s choice read like a Daylesford Organic customer’s shopping list: ‘Slow-cooked hen’s egg, braised English leeks, purple potatoes and vacherin cream’ – none of this gives you the slightest clue what the plate is actually going to look like. ‘It’s like a sand dune,’ he said, which comes somewhere near explaining it. My Devon crab salad with smoked salmon, beetroot and horseradish cream arrived resembling some sort of Japanese ornamental hedgerow (if such a thing exists), and tasted as delicate and fresh as it looked.
My main was a pan-roasted fillet of stone bass. CGI blobs of purée surrounded an almost spherical lump of breaded fish – it was oddly attractive, despite resembling some of the more outré architecture from The Sims. It’s funny when you get an absolutely perfectly done piece of fish – so rare is it, in fact, that it’s at first a slightly disquieting experience. But the crunch of the crumb (actually potato rather than bread) offset the luxuriantly soft fish like a hot bath on an icy day. ‘Phwoaar,’ Rufus said as he wrenched a lump off my plate. I wasn’t in any position to disagree.
Korean head chef Joo Won is relatively new to the top job, but he’s obviously taken notes from his years as a senior sous-chef here. It’s virtually impossible to fault the cooking at Galvin; this is proper, grown-up international food without any of the intimidating, euro-trashy baggage that might imply. If £68 for three courses at dinner might seem a bit of a wallet frightener, it’s well worth checking out the set lunch menu: at £25 for two courses or £29 for three (plus that view!), it’s a blinder. ‘High end’ and ‘West End’ are seldom located within a thousand words of the phrase ‘good value’, but the Galvin brothers have somehow managed it.
Within minutes of stepping into the lift, we’d resolved to return for lunch at some point. Flailing about for the correct terminology to sum up what we’d just eaten, we sunk back down the Hilton Tower. We’d been wrong about almost everything – and very happy about it we were, too.
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