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Bread Street Kitchen
Gordon Ramsay Holdings via Bloomberg
The interior of Bread Street Kitchen, Gordon Ramsay‘s latest restaurant in London. The eatery is located inside the One New Change shopping mall.
The interior of Bread Street Kitchen, Gordon Ramsay‘s latest restaurant in London. The eatery is located inside the One New Change shopping mall. Source: Gordon Ramsay Holdings via Bloomberg
Gordon Ramsay
Alastair Miller/Bloomberg
Gordon Ramsay reopened the Savoy Grill which has been popular with celebrities for decades.
Gordon Ramsay reopened the Savoy Grill which has been popular with celebrities for decades. Photographer: Alastair Miller/Bloomberg
Ramsay’s New Restaurant Offers Personality, Style, Chewy Salmon
Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen
is a great-looking restaurant. The style is industrial, yet with
clever lighting and enough quirky detail to break up the
cavernous space and imbue it with a degree of personality.
I’m just not sure I want to eat there.
It’s a big, bold establishment with a menu to match, or
indeed several menus. The food is divided into five sections –
raw bar, salads, hot kitchen, wood stone, puddings — with three
sets of starters and two lots of mains. It’s a bit confusing,
although that wouldn’t matter if the food was all good.
It’s not. Some dishes are commendable, most are OK and at
least one — the salmon ceviche — was a stinker when I tried
it: chewy and unpleasant and barely recognizable even as fish.
The king crab and apple cocktail with pink peppercorns was
better, as it should be with a 15 pound ($23) price tag, the
most expensive starter unless you’re in white-truffle mode.
The wood-stone menu is a safer bet. Tamarind chicken wings
with spring onions and coriander are a sticky pleasure if you
don’t mind getting your hands dirty and paying 8 pounds for the
pleasure. It’s hard to go wrong with meatballs in tomato sauce
or heritage tomato and onion tart with burrata cheese. Crispy
pig’s head with green chili mayonnaise was unappetizing.
The mains are generally uncomplicated, which is a positive,
and the kitchen has to keep the dishes moving out swiftly.
A dish of venison with a sour-cherry sauce stands out from
the opening days because the sauce was an unexpected and
pleasant surprise. The short-rib burger, by contrast, lacks the
depth of flavor you can get at nearby Goodman.
Tangy Sauce
Poussin with chimichurri and burnt lemon is good: the tangy
sauce distinctive enough to be interesting without drowning the
flavor of the kitchen. The desserts are generally fine.
There are many positive things about Bread Street Kitchen
in addition to Russell Sage’s designs. I particularly like the
wide range of wines by the glass, including fine wines at as
much as 27.50 pounds a time. It’s a handy place to drop by if
you fancy a drink and a plate of food after work. I’m just
surprised that it isn’t better.
I’d say there’s too much ambition in the prices and not
enough in the food if it weren’t for the crowds of contented-
looking diners I’ve seen there.
Ramsay played a central role in raising London restaurant
standards in the late 1990s and has struggled to replicate that
fine-dining success in casual establishments.
The opening was a bit of a mess. The low point for me was
when my guest pointed out to a sommelier that the red wine was
heated. He replied that there was a fault with the storage and
he was “aware of it.” The food came out so slowly that I had
to leave before dessert. The wine was still on the bill.
I’ve been back twice since and the teething problems have
been sorted out. What’s left is a restaurant whose casual style
isn’t reflected in the prices. Starters from the raw bar are
mostly in the 10 pounds to 15 pounds range, while most hot mains
cost between 15 and 20 pounds. Puddings are 7 pounds to 8
pounds.
For lunch, you might eat much better for less at Ramsay’s
Petrus, where the menu du jour is 30 pounds for three courses.
The Bloomberg Questions
Cost? More than 30 pounds, plus drinks, for three courses.
Sound level? Loud music + hard surfaces = 80 decibels plus.
Inside tip? Try the street-level bar.
Special feature? Famous owner.
Will I be back? Not in a hurry.
Date place? Other options spring to mind.
Rating? **.
Bread Street Kitchen is at 10 Bread Street, One New Change,
London, EC4M 9AF. Information: +44-20-7592-1616;
http://www.breadstreetkitchen.com/home.
What the Stars Mean: **** Incomparable food, service, ambience *** First-class of its kind. ** Good, reliable. * Fair. (No stars) Poor.
Sound-Level Chart (in decibels): 65-70: Office noise. 70-
75: Starbucks. 75-80: London street. 80-85: Alarm clock at
closest range. 85-90: Passing bus. 85-95: Tube train.
(Richard Vines is the chief food critic for Muse, the arts
and leisure section of Bloomberg News. He is U.K. and Ireland
chairman of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. Opinions
expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story:
Richard Vines in London at
[email protected] or http://twitter.com/Richardvines.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Manuela Hoelterhoff at
[email protected].
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