Rib Room Bar & Restaurant

The rib roast and steak were magnificent.

I joined a couple of business colleagues for an evening meal and the level of service was excellent. Our waiter was attentive but not intrusive and the manager joined us for a moment to ensure we had everything we wanted, and that we were happy with everything so far. The selection of the food was excellent, and I had the scallops to start and the Rib Eye for main course with two vegetable selections to complement. Food was excellent and the steak fantastic. My only criticism, and it is nit picking is that i felt to low to the ground with the seats when compared to the height of the table.

The main claim to fame of the Rib Room is that it does British food well and it undoubtedly scores in that respect. The Classics on the menu looked a little staid to us but the Seasonal dishes seemed to offer imagination and contrasting flavours so we went for the latter. The food is extremely well done – great flavours and very well presented. Nothing too risky though – this is cooking which oozes grace and style but not off the wall genius. The atmosphere is quite relaxed – smart but not overbearing. Being a hotel restaurant, no doubt some of the diners were guests who had popped down for something to eat. I liked the split level effect in the dining room and the arm chairs were extremely comfortable. Service is very attentive – if erring towards being overly so: restaurants need to realise that allowing a guest's water glass to be empty is not a capital offence!! The lady sommelier was very helpful. The Tablet wine list was a good idea but even greater ability to search against price and country/varietal would improve it further. The one downside is the price. £58 for 3 courses is pretty steep and without any amuse-bouche or pre-dessert. It was also the first time I've seen a 15% service charge in London. But for special occasions (as ours was) the Rib Room delivers the goods.

My husband and I treated ourselves to a three-course dinner yesterday evening and we were pleasantly surprised at how good it was despite a recent review I'd seen in the Guardian. We both had beef tartar to start which was prepared at our table exactly to our liking. I had the dover sole for main, which was a bit pricey but well worth it. My husband had the sirloin steak which was tasty and cooked medium to precision. Our desserts were a gloriously sticky ginger pudding with cinnamon ice cream and a selection of smelly British cheeses. Excellent food overall and the waiters were extremely attentive. For a Thursday night, the place was buzzing with a combination of hotel guests and business meetings so there was a bit of atmosphere but in general I think it's a relatively demure and grown-up setting. Would definitiely recommend it but beware of extortionate wine prices.

The restaurant itself is a lot nicer that it looks in the photographs online , the feel I got from the hotel as a whole was very much a business impression, quite masculine as well. The Jemeriah also has a cigar menu , with their own blended cigar which customers are invited to enjoy on the terrace. We sat in one of the private dining rooms which seated 12 people, the rooms are very cosy and have a warm front room feel to them, big lights that are dimmed and big pieces of art work. They are closed off with big curtains so you still get the buzz of the restaurant ( which was very busy last night ) we had the curtains open and you still feel separate yet part of the atmosphere. They have a huge wine and champagne menu with around 500 to chose from , there head sommelier Louise is half way through writing a description for every single wine. You select the drinks and cigars from an Ipad with photos, price and description. How modern! The food was amazing, the rib of beef i ordered rare and it really was quite rare! The type of beef where your knife cuts through it like butter! The table where also served with sides of spinach , potato, carrots and gravy. The biggest and best roast I’ve ever had. It’s not cheap though at £42! I heard no complaints from around the table all night. The service was good, not amazing but good. They also bring out birthday plates if your celebrating! They finish the food off at the tables which is a really nice touch, they also serve beef tartar (at the table ) which is now a rare dish to find! It’s a lovely central location and a busy restaurant.

At the risk of putting the tweeters/twits/tw@s (what is the collective noun for somebody who thinks anyone cares what they say in 140 characters or less?) at @hardenbites# to sleep, here's a review from a lawyer, not paid for at all, let alone by the word. The Rib Room sounds like some feminist gathering place, which is an odd choice for a male lawyer to go, seeing as how our profession is so notoriously sexist. Yes, yes, we all know that senior partners prattle on about how much women add to the profession, with them plugging away?to develop a plan to help boost female partner numbers, whilst firing them all. So I went there with a female partner from a Magic Circle firm, before it was too late. Top Restaurants In Posh Hotels seem to be either cool (Heston) or arrived at through a tart’s boudoir (Alain Ducasse). The Rib Room falls most emphatically into the latter. I know it is the Christmas season (or Holiday Season as our Septic Friends would wrongly have it), but do you really need this over abundance of expensive watches/shoes/bling lining the corridor leading to the restaurant, or the myriad dangly gilded baubles hanging from the ceiling? Come on; is it a hotel or a shopping mall in Dubai? Once in the restaurant, however, the mood changes. The room is old school; a sunken bar surrounded by brown slate-lined walls and green leather banquets. It feels like the whole has been transported from a Manhattan men’s club. And it is all very masculine: no waitresses, only waiters; nothing prim and proper or soft here, the place is hard edged, screaming Business Deals; the only single people being Business Men, intent on stocking up on protein before The Big Deal. The menu reveals a different side, however. That side being 1970’s Britain: prawn cocktail; yes. Steak and chips; oh yes. Black Forest Gateaux; yes, yes, oh yes. I kid you not. The menu could have come from a ‘70’s dinner party. I had to see what my parents had been so enthralled by all those decades back. I really wish I’d tried the cheese course too: perhaps it would have come on cocktail sticks, poking out of half a foil covered grapefruit, replete with tinned pineapple chunks. OK, if you are going to do irony, do it well. And they do. The prawn cocktail resists the temptation of being served in a wine glass, instead coming in an enormous glass bowl affair, bits of lettuce and endive poking out of big mound of prawns Marie Rose. The steak is aged (of course) and comes with a choice of a la mode sauces, including the most excellent bone marrow. The Black Forest Gateaux is not billed as such, instead being cleverly disguised as a black forest “chocolate delice”. They are, however, fooling nobody: it had chocolate, whipped cream and Kirsch soaked cherries. If that’s not a BFG, then nothing is. Away from Abigail’s Party, the other dishes were perfectly pleasant: lamb sweetbreads came with a foam, just to show that we were in the 21st century and lamb chops were pinkish and tasted of lamb. Oh, and the wine list comes on an iPad (2 no less). Now that is a first for me, and is genius: forget trying to leaf through a leather bound tome, sweating under the glare of the snotty nosed sommelier. The iPad allows you to slice and dice by grape, region and style, whilst giving you the chance to learn more about each wine by clicking through your preferences. It might not make things any cheaper (and there are some nose-bleedingly high priced vinous offerings here), but it is a really fun way to make the oft painful task of choosing a wine from a ridiculously long, complex list, a lot simpler and easier. Service is friendly without being intrusive, managing to get the right balance between being there when required and not being then when not needed, with a warmth and genuine helpfulness that is just not there with too many London restaurants. That the waiting staff is all Italian might have helped. The Rib Room is never going to win awards for the excellence of the fare, but it is a fine enough place for an expense account dinner. It took Andreas Vesalius in 1543 to point out that women didn’t have a spare rib, but the same number of bones pointing out of their thoracic vertebrae as men. Maybe some time within the next 468 years senior partners of our biggest firms will work out that women have the same ability as their male counterparts. Who knows, by then the Rib Room may have morphed into a Manhattan women’s club instead. Whatever that looks like.