Is anyone still ordering room service? 

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Consider the club sandwich. It’s a strange thing — hey, extra slice of toast! — that doesn’t seem to exist in real life outside the golf club in Curb Your Enthusiasm. But there’s a place where it rules supreme: its spiritual home, the hotel room service menu.

Room service is a shape-shifting beast, sometimes sublime, sometimes a place where it’s forever “chicken tikka masala curry” and soup of the day (thanks, Best Western). When I think about dining in hotels, I think about restaurants, not rooms. Joints that attract big name chefs like influencers round a free brunch. Room service is frequently a shrug of afterthought. If the likes of Tom Kerridge and Jean-Georges Vongerichten aren’t in the kitchen much, you can be sure as eggs they ain’t doing the graveyard shift. Even with audiences primed for room service, many hotels phone it in. Those on main travel hubs usually brandish the sort of bleak dining room only Alan Partridge could love. But lukewarm chilli in front of Love Island and detritus left outside rooms are even bleaker.

Sure, I’ve had the other end of the scale. But that comes with challenges too. I’m painfully middle-class enough to full-body cringe at pressing cash directly into people’s hands for one thing. Brace for the least relatable story ever: I once lucked into a suite at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok that came with a butler. Well, “lucked”: it was the only upside of being trapped in the city thanks to that Icelandic volcano. I spent the entire stay trying to outrun him so he wouldn’t hit the lift button for me and had to beg him not to leave vast chocolate elephants in the room every evening. Dinner in the room was unbearable, constant interruptions, overbearing solicitousness. Do the rich like this level of service? I can’t cope. And I’m not even touching on him unpacking my dirty laundry.

In a highly desirable hanok hotel in Seoul I had zero sleep thanks to a pancake-thin mattress on hard tiles blessed with the planet’s most ferocious underfloor heating. I longed for breakfast, something comforting, pleasurable, familiar. Instead — knowing I was writing about the trip — beaming staff delivered a series of tiny dishes on a tray: a grey-green gloop of bitter mugwort; ossified salted corvina fish; several banchan. I adore kimchi, but right then it did not spark joy. I could have wept, especially when the beautiful central courtyard was fringed with guests sitting on their terraces tucking into bacon, eggs and — sob — toast. If they had proper beds, I might have gone nuclear.

Who orders room service without the loneliness of the long-distance traveller excuse? The terminally lazy or incurious? (I will never not leave the hotel in search of culinary adventure.) The overpaid? Couples on sexathons? I’ve heard some stories. The PR from an upscale hotel in rural Ireland told me about the 1990s girlband member who booked into a suite with a cleric (also female), the two of them proceeding to lash thousands on steaks and burgundy. Fair enough, if you don’t want to put your clothes on long enough to go to the restaurant. This, I kind of get.

In cities there are delivery apps, which is perhaps why lesser establishments’ efforts are so half-cocked. I checked out the websites of some high-profile hotels, and room service is rarely mentioned. One exception is The Savoy, grand old dame of The Strand with its clutch of Gordon Ramsay restaurants. Its menu seems designed with the brief of “nibbles for jaded oligarchs”, but then I expect you don’t need to worry that “caviar and condiments” or “Wagyu tartare” might degrade too profoundly en route from kitchen to penthouse (or be found on Deliveroo). Or the Berkeley, also with “to nibble” including Petrossian caviar at £475 and oysters. I’d like to see anyone nibbling an oyster. I now have a mental image of terry-towelled plutocrats gerbilling their dinners the length of the country.

Of course, there are those who work hard at it. My pal Robbie Bargh, of hotel and restaurant consultants the Gorgeous Group, tells me about rooms with special amber lighting and designed-for-dining furniture. There are also the try-hards. At Soho Farmhouse, he says they delivered breakfast “on the back of an old milk float”. This fills me with dismay, in a “hold my beer, Marie Antoinette” kind of way.

I judge hotels by small generosities. Is there real milk in the minibar? Something home-made, a gloriously chewy cookie or two in a Kilner jar? You’re in safe hands. My room service rules: never get breakfast unless so driven by passion you can’t sling on a pair of trackies to hit the dining room — hotel breakfasts are one of life’s great joys. Forget the bendy triple toast sandwich. Order the burger.

Marina O’Loughlin is a writer, editor and restaurant critic

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