Is This Mayfair’s Best New Tasting Menu?

In the mood for Korean fine dining? Check out Dosa, the brand new chef’s table restaurant at Mandarin Oriental Mayfair.

Review: Dosa, Mandarin Oriental Mayfair

They say hunger heightens the senses, but even the anticipation of a truly incredible meal at Dosa didn’t stop me from walking right past the newly-opened Mandarin Oriental Mayfair at least twice before I finally located the lobby. Upon direction from the gracious staff, I descended into the hotel’s cavernous restaurant, but it was here that I found myself lost again. Dosa, it turns out, is tucked away behind a secret door. They don’t call it an intimate dining experience for nothing: this 14-cover chef’s table is a veritable treasure trove.

Helmed by award-winning chef Akira Back and executive chef Jihun Kim, Dosa offers a daily-changing, Korean-inspired tasting menu. It doesn’t exactly come cheap – the experience is priced at £185, excluding the wine pairing – but it certainly promises a magnificent meal. In a distinct departure from traditional omakase counters, the room is finished in sleek stone and burnished metal; in the centre of it all, the chefs move as if under a spotlight, effortlessly preparing an eight-course feast that left me in wonder (and feeling delightfully – but not uncomfortably – full). 

Our meal started with a bowl of fragrant chicken consumé with a wafer-thin slice of cured wagyu beef balanced carefully on the rim. Next came an ingenious pine nut ‘doughnut’ topped with caviar and trout, followed by a punchy gochujang tart and a silky duck liver dish fashioned to look like a glossy cherry. Every bite felt like a treat – and these were only the canapés.

Our first course showcased three different types of seasonal roe: cuttlefish, seabass and yellowtail. Nestled in pearlescent, gold-rimmed bowls, this is the kind of stuff that you might expect to be handed across the counter with a melodramatic flourish, but there’s no fanfare here; watching everything come to life in front of you, after all, is thrilling enough. We sipped on a smooth Grecian white wine and polished off every morsel of fish, but there was more to come: the next course consisted of lobster kimbap (rice, fish and vegetables rolled in sheets of seaweed). 

It’s dangerous, so early on in what’s sure to be a flawless meal, to decide on your favourite dishes – but I just couldn’t help marvelling at the kimbap. Stuffed with lobster preserved (for no less than a week) in soy sauce, mirin and sake, it was finished with a generous helping of caviar and rolled up right in front of me. It felt at once utterly indulgent and somehow casual, like a meal shared between friends; a slight difference, admittedly, to the courses that followed, which consisted of a particularly elegant turbot dish (served with a brilliant non-alcoholic wine) and Rhug Estate salt marsh lamb (accompanied by an earthy Italian red).

All of this felt like a rather hard act to follow when it came to dessert – how, exactly, do you round off such an expertly crafted meal? There’s only one way, apparently: with sweetcorn. Well, not actual sweetcorn, but a picture-perfect, truly mindblowing corn-flavoured dish (which did, in fact, look exactly like corn on the cob). With a crunchy corn base, cornflake ice cream and a drizzle of 25 year-old balsamic vinegar for good measure, it tasted like the best (and most innovative) buttery popcorn you could ever hope to try. 

Such brilliance was matched by a parting gift of petit fours (a white chocolate miso caramel, a mandarin jelly, and a dark chocolate and pistachio tahini) before, regrettably, I bid farewell to the incredible chefs and staff and made my way back through that secret door. 

THE FINAL WORD

It seems Dosa is Mandarin Oriental Mayfair’s best-kept secret. If you’re looking for a special occasion restaurant or you’re just in the mood for a treat, you can expect a rather unforgettable evening.

BOOK IT

Dosa is open from Wednesday to Saturday with one sitting at 7pm. The tasting menu is priced at £185, with an additional wine pairing at £145 and a non-alcoholic option at £85.

Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, 22 Hanover Square, Mayfair, W1S 1JP. mandarinoriental.com