The Midland Grand, London NW1: ‘This may be the campest restaurant in the UK’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

Fancy, memorable and beautiful, with very Marie Antoinette’s boudoir vibes

The Midland Grand might be one of the most useful recent restaurant openings in the entire UK. Of course, no restaurant wants to be called useful; they’d much prefer flowery prose such as “gastronomically enlightening” or “a shattering orgasm for the tastebuds” or some other stuff they’d be able to regurgitate on the promotional material.

The Midland Grand, however, is both very grand and mere metres from both King’s Cross and St Pancras stations, should you be passing through and not want to go much farther. It’s in a side wing of the reliably fabulous St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which I often tell visitors to London is the “big, gothic, Harry Potter-esque one that you really can’t help but notice because it’s so fantastic”. The Renaissance is a paean to what can happen when we treat beautiful old things such as 19th-century, neo-gothic, 300-room hotels nicely, rather than rip them down to build new retail experiences.