Hotel restaurants can get a bad deal if non-residents don’t think of hotels as destination venues for dining, which means potential diners could be missing out on some excellent meals. The Loft, where the food is top quality, is a prime example.

The Venue
The Loft restaurant is part of the Mercure London City Bankside Hotel. It’s a pleasant, modern four star hotel with a main entrance on Southwark Street, from where access may be gained to The Loft, which also has its own entrance in Lavington Street. It is well named for it is in three parts with a bar area and atrium for drinks and quick snacks, a large main dining room and a small upstairs annexe on a mezzanine level that resembles a loft. It also has conference facilities in six rooms of varying sizes named after famous painters such as Dali, Picasso, Matisse and Rothko. Versatility is the name of the game here.

The Atmosphere
The decor is uniform brown, good, solid-looking furniture with the occasional splash of colour plus unusual design. It feels very informal and welcoming and a nice place whether you are resident at the hotel or not. As a place to stay it has easy access to nearby Southwark and Waterloo in one direction and London Bridge in the other, so it is close to all the South Bank and Bankside visitor attractions such as the London Eye, Tate Modern, Borough Market and Southwark Cathedral, but in a pleasanter and quieter part of the capital. Some, however, may find the restaurant a little too quiet. At lunchtime it seems busy for a while with customers talking business and then everybody leaves to return to their offices. However, quiet can sometimes be, in this noisy day and age, a blessed and welcome relief.

The Food
Apart from the main a la carte menu which changes seasonally, The Loft has, particularly for its residents, a dish of the day which offers a main course with a glass of wine for £16. This gives regular customers something new every day and it could be anything, a choice of meat or fish, depending what’s available at the nearby Borough Market. However, fish is always on the Friday menu. The main list offers six starters, six main dishes and six desserts, all individually priced from £5 to £10 for starters, £14 to £23 for mains, and £6 to £7 for desserts, with a cheese platter at £9.50. With a relatively short menu, The Loft can concentrate on offering an eclectic choice with superb attention to detail.

Starters offer leek and potato soup with tarragon oil, salmon carpaccio with Chinese vinegar-marinated radish and wasabi mousseline, Stilton and caramelised onion tart, and seared scallops with fresh pea compote and a cold pressed olive oil dressing. The fresh rabbit terrine is a nicely rough, thick pate with chunky pieces of the meat well blended and flavoured and served on a bed of baby salad leaves. The two components of the marinated wood pigeon and fresh fig salad are terrific together. The meat, cooked slightly rare, is pleasantly gamey in flavour, as tender as anything, with no chewing required as it dissolves on tasting. It is served warm on a bed of diced pieces of fig which offers an added sweetness to the dish and another texture that is most satisfying. This would make a really good main course too.

The main courses themselves present a good range of dishes from roast fillet steak, with wild mushroom gratin, cocotte potato and a red wine sauce for the outright carnivore, to roast butternut squash risotto for the vegetarian diner. In between are char grilled mackerel fillets with fried potatoes and crispy Parma ham, horseradish and dill sauce, and pan fried salmon supreme with a bundle of mange tout, roast baby potatoes and sun-dried tomato sauce. The pan fried sea bass is almost revelatory: perfect and brilliant white fillets of this most delicious fish, with just a tinge of light brown colouring on top and a fine crisp finish to the texture of the skin. Served on juicy and moist saffron risotto with a light herb sauce, this dish could not be bettered. No wonder sea bass is so popular now, especially when it is cooked as well as this. Oven-cooked venison steak is another recommendation. Again very tender and with that gamey flavour that is just this side of richness, it is a splendid (and healthy) meat as it has virtually no fat. The accompanying stack of black pudding slices interleaved with creamy parsnip mash is probably not so good for the figure but it is nonetheless a great addition that falls apart at the touch of the knife. The piece de resistance is the Pinot Noir sauce that tops off the dish brilliantly.

From a dessert choice that includes espresso creme brulee, lemon tart, dark chocolate and raspberry mousse. The hazelnut chocolate tiramisu and praline and Bicerin liqueur makes a rich and creamy finale, while the pear tarte tatin with sweet raspberry mascarpone is well worth the fifteen minutes it takes to cook. The recommended accompaniments to these desserts are a glass of Pommery brut champagne with the tiramisu, and Newton Johnson Chenin noble late harvest dessert wine: two perfect matches.

The Drink
And that brings us to the wine selection at The Loft. Each dish from the starters through mains to desserts has a recommended wine to go with it. These are drawn from the list of Les Grands Vins, the speciality wine list at The Loft. Individual glasses of wine are priced from £4.85 to £10, although the average is around £6. This is a brilliant idea and it means you get to taste the best wine to go with each course. A Spanish Cabernet Sauvignon is the choice with the rabbit terrine and a French Pinot Noir for the wood pigeon. A Meusault Villages makes a fine choice for the sea bass and a Gevrey Chambertin matches the venison extremely well. However, you are not obliged to choose the recommended wines, and there are other bottles available that you may prefer.

The Last Word
The Loft manages to tick all the right boxes: welcoming and efficient staff, quiet but informal atmosphere, excellent and imaginative cuisine, a fine and original wine list, and an overall ambience of comfort. The Loft scores on all counts.

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