ALEX Salmond has featured in a scathing review of a restaurant described as somewhere “rich people pay ludicrous prices for cack-handed food”.

The Alba Party leader was spotted at the rooftop Polo Lounge at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, where a basket of bread costs £16 and a steak £135.

The former first minister, who makes a weekly TV show for a Kremlin-funded channel in London, was name-checked in today’s Observer by reviewer Jay Rayner.

Noting the original Polo Lounge opened at LA’s Beverley Hills Hotel in 1941, he said: “At the London version I got to eat a table away from Alex Salmond. And that that was the least troubling aspect of my evening.”

Mr Rayner then savaged the quality of the food and the prices, including salads that start at £28, a bowl of pasta at £38, and the cheapest bottle of wine costing £84.

He said the restaurant "seems to be bashing the rich, flogging them dismal food at inexplicable prices”.

Besides his TV and book income, Mr Salmond has been entitled to a £42,000-a-year pension as a former first minister since he left office in 2014.

In March, he launched the Alba party in a bid to secure an undefined ‘supermajority’ for independence at the Holyrood election, but failed to get a single MSP elected.