My wife and I ate here for our last meal in London. We’ve been watching Hell’s Kitchen since season 1, so we were interested to try one of his flagship restaurants (I have eaten at some of his restaurants in Vegas, the latest being Hell’s Kitchen which was very meh).

There was their regular tasting menu (Menu Prestige) and their surprise menu (Carte Blanche) which is 50 pounds more. We both went with the Carte Blanche, although I’m surprised we didn’t do one of each just so we could try more variety of dishes.

Overall, I’d say the experience was a bit uneven. I loved the plating of the chawanmushi course (the dish with the caviar), but it totally threw me off that it was called chawanmushi because the egg custard was cold (I’m told that this is a traditional preparation, but was new to me). Flavors were quite good, but that just threw me off. The plating for most of the other dishes is somewhat uninspired. I was showing my sister these pictures and she said it looked like peak ’90s fine dining, lol.

Service was also a bit of a mixed bag. They definitely went for much more of the hyper-attentive route. For the first set of starters/amuse, there were 3 different bites served at the same time. As we finished one of the set of bites, within 5 seconds, someone was there to remove the plate. It just felt a bit intrusive at times.

It was a good meal overall, but we both strongly preferred our experience at CORE by Clare Smyth a few days earlier (I didn’t realize until very recently that Clare Smyth had actually been head chef here in the early 2000s).

https://www.gordonramsayrestaurants.com/restaurant-gordon-ramsay/