‘The whole operation was a bloody shambles’ — Jay Rayner reviews RH London, Mayfair

If you should ever have a total lapse of judgment and good taste and decide to buy a cream-coloured sofa, which will immediately attract enough stains to keep a CSI team happy for weeks, then RH London is the place for you. It’s Ikea for plutocrats who long ago mislaid any sense of perspective and now think purchasing a bleached-out Jennifer Low Back three-seater for £13,480 is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The upmarket furniture showroom, where beige is a way of life and every gallery looks like the foyer of an upmarket Botox salon, is housed in a Palladian mansion just behind Burlington Arcade. It’s the latest international opening from RH, a $3bn home-furnishing company that will flog you a knock-off Venus de Milo for £2,100 or a trip on one of its branded Gulfstream jets (price on application).

Drift through its rooms admiring the oversized sculptures, the overstuffed seating and the passive-aggressive war on colour. I was tempted to give myself a quick nosebleed just to introduce a splash of red. While there, do take a look inside the utterly magnificent restaurant at the back of the ground floor, housed in what was once a banking hall. The cathedral-high ceilings are coated in gold leaf and dangle with giant golden chandeliers like crystal udders. There are pillars, acres of polished wood veneer and lots of soft curved seating, picked out by pools of light from dainty table lamps. Gawp at it. Gasp at it. But whatever you do, don’t book a table in it. On my recent visit, the whole operation was a bloody shambles.

I went because I thought it would be fun to eat in a restaurant where, presumably, you could later buy all the furnishings. Hey, I could recreate the experience at home. I assumed that a company using high-end hospitality to sell an aspirational lifestyle would have nailed the whole thing.

It might not be my cup of late-harvest, single-estate tea, but it would be intriguing. Instead, I’d call it amateur hour, if that weren’t an insult to people who love their hobbies.

It starts in the second-floor cocktail bar, designed by Anouska Hempel, where the £16 Margarita comes from a bottle of pre-mix with a hand-scribbled label, and they can’t make any classic cocktails which aren’t on the list. Ask them for a Daiquiri then watch the panic flicker in their eyes. Online, the cheapest bottle of wine offered up here is a Riesling at £68. When you arrive, it turns out to be £86.

Back downstairs in the restaurant a bottle of sparkling water is brought. It’s warm. We ask for ice. None comes. We ask again. None comes. Third time’s a charm. At least we get water quickly; the wait for food is interminable (if you don’t count the £56-worth of mini lobster rolls we didn’t order, that they tried to foist on us). We watch one of our dishes being offered to a nearby table. The diners look baffled. The waiter returns to the pass in the open kitchen where a row with the chef appears to ensue. He waves a ticket at her. Finally, 10 minutes later the plate comes to us. In a functioning restaurant you should be able to spot the person in charge immediately. There is no one in charge of this room. It’s chaos.

I ask our waiter who the manager is tonight. He mentions a name “but she’s not on the floor right now”. Too right she isn’t. I also ask the waiter if the dining-room furniture is for sale. They don’t know. Perhaps if we come back tomorrow? I’ll be honest; I wasn’t planning to.

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The cooking is best described as dull food for rich people who don’t eat and therefore really don’t care whether it arrives or not. Across the aisle from us, a woman has dumped her £8,000+ Hermès Birkin bag on a windowsill where it lies slumped, as if embossed with the words “What? This old thing?”. Our missing dish is the cutely named “Parisian petite potato”. I wanted to see what a £22 baked potato was like. Small, is the answer, and topped with the now obligatory caviar. Honestly, there’s so much caviar washing around London at the moment, I’m convinced there’s some bloke with a lock-up in Camberwell who has got hold of a surplus that fell off the back of a knackered old sturgeon. Now he’s pushing it out to W1. Anyway, it’s a baked potato with fish eggs. I’m not sure which bit of it is Parisian but it’s definitely petite, I’ll give it that.

The dish fits my mood because tonight I have chosen to eat like a bored oligarch. So that’s a Caesar salad, which is slippery and astringent, followed by a burger that doesn’t exist. Ten minutes after we order, the waiter returns to say they are out of burgers. At 7.45pm on a Tuesday? It takes staggering incompetence for a kitchen to run out of burgers. There’s a Whole Foods four minutes’ walk in one direction and, if that doesn’t feel quite sprauncy enough, the Fortnum’s food hall is five minutes’ walk in the other. I have the steak sandwich instead, filled with sliced bavette and harshly vinegary onions, all stuffed into a hard-crusted, heavy-crumbed baguette which was doubtless lovely yesterday.

Other things are better when they eventually arrive. There is some nicely charred octopus in a lemon dressing and a whole grilled sea bass, boned out before cooking. They can cook chips and broccoli. For dessert there is lemon sorbet inside a hollowed-out lemon, like we’re in a 1970s British pub which is trying to up its dessert game. We also have a good butterscotch crème brûlée, with a fine sugar shell. The menu description for that is “no words”. And honestly, I’d say the same about this place but my job does demand rather more of me, hence I’ve just given you almost 1,000 of them.

So let me finish with a few more: I wouldn’t buy a sofa from an outfit which sold me a dinner like this.

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