Two major world-smashing international hotels positively crammed with top-of-the-range fine dining venues opened in London in 2023 and you’ll either have noticed that I didn’t bother to review any of them, or not be working in luxury PR.

The problem was, I didn’t feel that either Raffles at the Old War Office (OWO) or the Peninsula London at Hyde Park Corner really spoke to my personal dining needs. I appreciate that international hotels were once a byword for glamour and good times, that from the 1890s until the end of the Jazz Age, especially in New York, and to a lesser extent London, Paris and elsewhere, their attempt to incorporate all of life under one roof really set the tone for a century of excitement