Hotels often have highly-regarded restaurants, but could Petrichor at the Cavendish manage a highly-regarded Caesar Salad? It’s a chicken caesar, like so many of these dishes, but I was prepared to overlook that in hopes that we’d find something wonderful.

Sitting by the window overlooking Jermyn Street, it’s a slightly unusual serving that’s put in front of you. The gem lettuce (wrong, I know) is in huge chunks rather than individual leaves and spindly parmesan crisps decorate the sides. There’s also a breaded poached egg (a nice touch) and an array of infinitesimal garlic croutons.

Upon trying the salad, we found that the lettuce chunks were just as chargrilled as the chicken. It added a slightly smoky flavour to the leaf vegetable, but the main issue seemed to be the difficulty involved in hacking apart the lettuce and avoiding the thick and rather tasteless spine.

The light dressing was also slightly smoky, almost peppered, and it provided an interesting taste combination with the chicken and parmesan. But, O patient reader, I’m sure there’s only one real question haunting your every waking moment: was it a great Caesar Salad?

Sadly, no. It was a nice enough chicken salad, with interesting additions and tastes, but it wasn’t what we came there to try.  I’d give it a 7/10 as an intriguing salad dish with grilled chicken, but only a 3/10 as a Caesar. It seems the chefs at the Petrichor spent too much time coming up with the new and exciting, and not nearly enough getting the basics right. A sadly common refrain in these reviews, it would seem.