With Hotels With Great Taste, we’re pulling back the curtain for a peek at the “special sauce” that hotels use to create memorable, meaningful culinary experiences for their guests.
Have you been the victim of a sad hotel breakfast? Those overpriced, overcooked, and underseasoned eggs may not entitle you to compensation, per se, but you certainly deserve a do-over. The Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane is ready to help you forget the sorry gloopy excuse for Hollandaise of your past.
Located in the uber-posh Mayfair neighborhood, with Buckingham Palace just a jaunt across Hyde Park, the Four Seasons at Park Lane is as stately a property as the postcode demands. We’re talking floor-to-ceiling (a very, very high ceiling) windows, sumptuous fabrics in a neutral palette, and gleaming black marble floors that make your shoes go clickety-clack. When the gloved and uniformed doormen usher you inside, it makes you feel like you have Roman numerals after your name and a family estate in Gloucestershire. The hotel’s restaurant, Pavyllon by Yannick Alléno, is duly grand, with white tablecloths, velvet banquettes, and a menu that, according to general manager Romain Mervelay, marries French techniques with seasonal ingredients to please British palates.
Four Seasons London at Park Lane
Chef Alléno, who acts as consulting chef, seems to have cracked the Michelin code: Restaurants he’s affiliated with have a combined 17 stars from the tire company. And with Pavyllon London, he and chef Benjamin Ferra Y Castell aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. The dishes coming out of the kitchen (created by Castell, approved by Alléno) are mostly fine-dining classics, but what’s lacking in conceptual creativity is more than made up for in execution.
Nowhere is this more true than on the breakfast menu, where you’ll find the gang of usual AM suspects (eggs Benedict, avocado toast, maple pancakes) crafted to perfection. It’s like Castell, aware of Pavyllon’s role as a hotel restaurant that needs to feed weary travelers and business meeting-goers, is saying: “You want French toast? I’ll give you the best French toast you’ve ever had. Hold my tweezers…”
Four Seasons London at Park Lane
Gorgeous sauces and high-quality, often luxury, ingredients elevate the dishes above standard brunch fare, but what really makes them so good is the bread. From the stunning Viennoiserie you’re nibbling with your coffee to the scones served at high tea, to the baguette that accompanies Pavyllon’s Michelin-starred dinner, all of it is made in-house by a team led by executive pastry chef Francesco Mannino. And it’s all better than any hotel pastry has any right being.
The eggs Florentine is amazing because its English muffin is amazing. It’s fluffy, chewy, and slightly crispy on top thanks to a light fry, all the better to hold the nutmeg-spiced Comté cheese Hollandaise. The French toast is made with a sweet gâche that’s soaked in milk overnight. And the standout Turkish eggs—poached eggs, labne, and a mountain of fresh herbs atop a pillowy flatbread—debuted as a chef’s special but was made a permanent fixture thanks to diner demand. Now, about that Viennoiserie: The seasonal special during my visit was a picture-perfect knot of laminated dough filled with citrus and pistachio cream. It was mind-blowingly good.
