A restaurant in a hotel airport doesn’t exactly bode well for fine dining, but when the man behind the menu is Michelin-starred French chef Albert Roux, it becomes more than just a fly-by experience.

The Venue
Brasserie Roux is located in the Sofitel Heathrow near Terminal Five, an attractive, Las Vegas-style hotel with huge ceilings and glass-encased lifts. The restaurant is towards one end of the long ground floor and continues the smart decor of the hotel lobby. Large leather chairs cluster around thick tables, high cabinets are decorated with strings of purple glass baubles and ornate silver mirrors hang from the walls. A pretty water feature burbles away happily in the centre of the restaurant, changing colours every few minutes from deep pink to grassy green to cool, clear blue. Despite these romantic touches, it still seems a bit cold, literally and figuratively, perhaps due to the enormously high ceilings that seem to stretch endlessly.

The Atmosphere
Diners seem to be almost exclusively hotel guests, mainly in groups of four or more, either celebrating their arrival in London or passing time before their next flight. You can probably think of worse ways to spend an evening, as the staff here are exceptionally warm and friendly, happy to make suggestions and recommendations. Although you never really forget you’re in a hotel – those high ceilings again – it’s quite clear that you’re in a nice one.

The Food
As you might expect, Brasserie Roux has a brasserie-style menu, which offers more casual, unfussy dining than typical French fare in England. Besides the a la carte menu, there is a smaller menu classique (featuring more traditional dishes) as well as an express menu, which features four courses served at once for £19.50. The a la carte menu is divided into fish, beef and other meats for mains, with a choice each for pasta and risotto. Prices start at £10 for a free range chicken leg, rising to £28.50 for Dover sole, whilst a chateaubriand for two costs about £50.

From the list of starters, French onion soup (£7) is creamy, velvety and delicious, with a lovely thick consistency. It’s made with cider, and you can clearly taste the sweet, sharp apple. The pike mousse (£10) isn’t a typical fish dish, with a scoop of the mousse in a bowl of mushroom and lobster sauce. It has an interesting, fluffy consistency, and although you can instantly taste the lobster in the intensely flavoured sauce, the actual mousse has a very strong egg flavour that overpowers the taste of the fish completely. The sauce alone is worth ordering the dish for, however, as you’ll have to stop yourself from slurping it up like a soup.

For mains, a monkfish cassoulet (£18) is recommended for fans of the fish, as the smoky beans are a perfect complement to the hearty fish. Smoked salmon is also mixed through the beans, adding a rich, luxurious flavour and texture. Duck leg confit is one of Albert Roux’s signature dishes and is reproduced here as a thick, juicy piece of meat, with a pile of salty, floury potatoes scattered with strands of browned onions. It is a very large portion, more than worth the £16 it costs, but if you’re intent on finishing it you might want to skip your starter. Desserts, if you have room, include a fragrant, bittersweet lemon tart accompanied by a little basket of winter berries, and a rum baba with roasted pineapple, which is splashed with a shot of good quality rum to give it a boozy, sugary flavour.

The Drink
The lengthy wine list is about ten pages; bottles are divided up in to countries, whilst France dominates there’s a good amount of choice for other locations as well. There’s a full page of wines available by the glass, starting from £6.50, whilst Champagnes start at £41 per bottle and half bottle. Bottles of white start from £24 and reds from £26, the most expensive being a 1996 Chateau Latour, 1ere Cru Classe, Pauillac, for £1,641.

The Last Word
Whilst you wouldn’t come all the way out to Heathrow to eat at Brasserie Roux, you could do much, much worse for airport dining. If you are near Heathrow, however, it would be more than worth it to risk the maze of roundabouts to leave your hotel and head to the Sofitel Heathrow for dinner instead.

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