Flow your own way along familiar culinary waters

The wisdom of crowds - that the collective knows more than the singular expert - is not an idea that I trust, partly on the grounds of Tripadvisor and partly because I suppose if I did I'd have to fire myself.

- DAVID ELLIS

Still, one widely held banality strikes me as more or less true that there are no good hotel restaurants.

It’s not watertight, granted. There’s The Ritz, as flawless as a Saturday morning lie-in. Ormer at Flemings Mayfair; 1890 at the Savoy. The rest? I'll go — but only if someone else is paying.

Maybe you're thinking this is because hoteliers are mostly tightwads who promise chefs the world and then bully them into contracting cheap suppliers. But you'd be wrong: it’s about the loos. They're always a spell-breaking trek from the dining room, through grey corridors and out into reception, for a pre-pee assault course of tourists and trolleys and suitcases on the loose.

At Canal, there's none of that. The loos are to the side of the room, like a restaurant in long trousers ought to have. It has its own entrance too. In fact, the only giveaway that it’s not just a place in Westbourne Park but an add-on to the third London Mason & Fifth is the website. Oh, and the burger that necessarily but incongruously punctuates the menu. But that's hotels; someone is always going to want a burger.