This Lillie Langtry-themed room isn’t as seductive as it thinks, but the Caesar salad is a showstopper
The LaLee, The Cadogan, 75 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9SG (020 8089 7070). Starters £14-£20, mains £18-£49, desserts £6-£9.50, wines from £29
Restaurants aren’t merely dining rooms with kitchens attached. They are complex machines with invisible moving parts. Get the design wrong and it’s all grind and shudder, as if you’re on a train riding the breaks into Warrington Bank Quay. The design of the LaLee at the Cadogan hotel in Chelsea is all wrong. It doesn’t quite function. It feels like a restaurant put together by excitable designers who were thrilled with their cloth swatches, and their rug choices and the overall branding, but whose attention drifted during the meetings when the hotel’s food and beverage people explained what kind of a joint they actually had in mind.
