Restaurant Review: Hôtel Costes, Paris—an astonishingly vacuous triumph of style over substance.
On a recent trip to Paris I met up with some old friends. “You pick the restaurant! I’m happy to go wherever” I said, “—‘What could possibly go wrong?’ I thought. The restaurant that they picked was the Hôtel Costes in the centre of town.
Set on the upmarket Rue Saint Honoré in the 1st arrondissement, the Hôtel Costes is a five star hotel that boasts a 24 hour bar and restaurant, featuring an attractive internal courtyard that provides relief from the hot streets in the summer.
By all accounts, this sets it up well to provide a fabulous experience—unfortunately it wasn’t. The problems started early, we were greeted at the entrance to the terrace by a hostess, who, like all of the hostesses in the restaurant, was dressed in a fashionable short dress and not in a uniform. She took one look at us (not dress in designer clothing, but smart enough) and decided that we weren’t worth expending too much effort on and proceeded to make us wait before showing us to our table. The service went from bad to worse as drink proved slow to order and the food slower still.
On inspection of the menu, which is not published on the restaurant’s website, the food is eclectic with steamed salmon, curry and steak all featuring. When charging in the region of €40 a plate expectations are high. The steak proved ordinary, the curry bland and the salmon and astonishing triumph of style over substance (it seems likely to me that most amateur cook could have made a similar effort at home and bought the ingredients for a quarter of the price).
The actual setting is the kind of sumptuous luxury that befits a five star hotel in the centre of a major city, but, despite the pumping music and low lighting, somehow the atmosphere felt sterile—too many people either pretending to have a good time, or actually having a good time on someone else’s pocketbook, or else just bored by an experience that no longer excites them. Something of this atmosphere can be gleaned from the photographs of the restaurant on their website, some of which contain no people at all and another shows an inexplicably bare breasted women clutching a glass of wine and grinning—that counts as slightly bizarre marketing copy.
This is not a restaurant that I shall be returning to again and nor one that I would recommend to anyone. This is not, however, a review of the hotel, which I suspect is a luxurious and pleasurable place to stay.
The important questions:
What kind of food: all sorts, most of it low in calories and high in pretension.
Who to go with: your celebrity friends (don’t worry if you don’t have any, it’ll spare you from having to go).
When to go: late at night, when you’re too drunk to really care about how much the food and drinks cost.
What should I wear: if you’re going by the photos on the website, very little.
Where is it: on the Rue St Honoré, near the Place Vendôme.
Verdict:
Food 2/5
Service 1/5
Atmosphere 2/5
Value for money 1/5
Likelihood of having a good time 0/5
Overall: *