Dovetale

Dovetale sits inside 1 Hotel Mayfair, the group’s first UK property, which opened on Berkeley Street in July 2023. It marks chef Tom Sellers’ return to a big Mayfair stage after Story, his acclaimed Bermondsey restaurant, closed, and this time the ambition is bigger and more hotel scaled rather than a small, tightly controlled dining room, with a menu built to serve both hotel guests and a walk-in London crowd equally well.

The space is glamorous in the way flagship hotel restaurants tend to be, with confident design choices throughout, and reviewers have generally been positive about the kitchen team Sellers has assembled, describing the food as excellent with room to keep improving as the team settles in. It sits a couple of minutes from Green Park station, near the junction with Piccadilly, and functions as both a hotel dining room and a standalone destination for anyone not staying upstairs.

Reception has been more mixed than a straightforward win, though. Some diners report a genuinely stellar setting paired with terrific individual dishes, while others have pushed back hard on value, with one recurring complaint being around forty pounds for what amounted to little more than a single lamb chop. For a hotel restaurant at these prices, that kind of portion to cost mismatch matters more than it might at a smaller, independent site.

It’s early days for a restaurant inside a brand new hotel, and there’s a reasonable case that the kitchen needs more time to find its rhythm at this scale. Right now it reads as a restaurant with real talent behind it that hasn’t yet fully justified its price point on every dish, though the setting alone still makes it worth a look for a special dinner in Mayfair.

Worth watching rather than an automatic booking for anyone who remembers Sellers’ Michelin starred cooking at Story and is expecting the same tightness here.