Bread Street Kitchen, St Pauls

I think people have every right to be suspicious of the motives of a man who, already very wealthy from a string of restaurants around the world (not to mention television shows, book deals and product endorsements), decides to open yet another vast, multi-million-pound site. When is enough, enough? Will Gordon Ramsay ever sit down and think "you know what, I think I'm OK for money now. Once we get through this last batch of Gordon Ramsay Milk Frothers (RRP £40) I'm packing it all in and retiring to the Seychelles."



Maybe I'm being cynical in assuming it's even that much about the money anyway. Perhaps Bread Street Kitchen isn't intended to be a cash cow, just the kind of classy, New York meatpacking district restaurant, with its "raw bar" and classic cocktail list, that he himself enjoys eating in and wants to put his name to. You have to say this for Gordon Ramsay - he's never tried to start a Jamie's Italian-style chain of Ramsay Lites, and all his places, successful (Royal Hospital Road) or not (various defunct gastropubs), certain boil-in-the-bag fiascos aside, have at least looked like serious places to eat. As, in fact, does Bread Street Kitchen.


This monumentally huge room, very deliberately expensively decked out, is, even before you get as far as ordering so much as a glass of tap water, a fantastic place to spend an evening. I particularly enjoyed the way a mezzanine level had been built above the bar for rows of backlit wine cabinets, and everything from the furniture to the humorous bric-a-brac lighting was bold and beautiful. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I only ever notice décor if it's either really bad or really good, and this was definitely the latter.


It's interesting though isn't it, that when restaurants throw huge wads of cash at décor it more often than not shows, whilst doing the same thing for food just produces... expensive food, with no guarantee of quality. Don't get me wrong, the meal we had at Bread Street Kitchen was "nice", "good" even but it seems all too easy to spend way over your budget here and end up with a succession of solid, competent dishes that never quite seem like value. Take the starters:



Stone bass carpaccio with avocado, horseradish and ginger was fine. Rather muted in flavour and we could have done with something more citrusy than horseradish to cut through the blobs of avocado mayonnaise, but still perfectly edible. It was £11 though, and whilst I'm sure that price point has been studied and sculpted by the Ramsay top brass so as to very carefully just fall on the right side of "taking the piss", it's still slightly unnerving. And my tamarind chicken wings certainly lived up to their name, drowning in seemingly nothing but a rather one-note sharp tamarind sauce; they were cooked well with a nice crispy skin though.



Mains were better, but maybe it only seems like that because I went for the cheaper option - an £11 burger - while my friend had a stonking £24 veal chop. Readying myself for yet another "I'm a celebrity please don't sue me" cooked-through greyfest a la Barbecoa, I was delighted to find that the Bread St Kitchen burger is cooked medium rare, and contains a generous (if a bit cricket-ball-shaped) portion of good beef. Topped only with sliced pickles, a gooey layer of remarkably Ogleshield-like Bermondsey Frier cheese ("inspired" rather than "ripped off" from Hawksmoor, perhaps) and with a silky, solid brioche bun, I particularly liked the fact there was no tomato or huge chunks of iceberg in it, just a very thin layer of shredded lettuce underneath. Whilst not perfect, it was still one of the better "gourmet" burgers I've had recently and I was genuinely impressed. The aforementioned veal chop, too, was fantastic - moist inside with thick ribbons of creamy fat, seared to crispy loveliness on the outside and served on the bone.


It seems a bit mean to point a finger at service when the place has hardly been open a month, but while it was never unpleasant or annoying, it was occasionally hilariously scatty. I ordered a daiquiri, it arrived on the rocks but just as I was taking my first sip a waitress appeared next to my table with another one, this time in a martini glass. I looked up, mid-slurp, and before I had a chance to say anything she turned heels and scooted off. At one point during the meal champagne glasses were placed on our table, then following a furtive "not that table" from a more senior front of house, were silently whisked away. Less endearing was the fact that a cocktail I had ordered and they couldn't produce (they'd run out of dry ice - yes it was that kind of cocktail) still appeared on the bill, but it was easily and quickly corrected. I'm sure these kinds of things will settle down so it should never be a reason in of itself not to visit.

So, there's nothing drastically wrong with the place, it's beautifully decked out, the food is fine, the cocktails (based on my daiquiri and what some of my blogger friends have told me about the launch night) are well made and the staff were always charming if not always on the same planet. But, as ever, it all comes down to that question of value. For £42 a head with just one alcoholic drink and two courses each (plus a side), it's expensive. And hand on heart I can't see myself making a special journey to St Pauls (which is not very near to where I work or where I live) when there are places doing this kind of thing better elsewhere, for less. But if you find yourself in the area, desperate for a burger and a cocktail, have £40 burning a hole in your pocket and quite fancy a meal endorsed by an internationally famous celebrity chef, you can certainly do much worse. Jamie Oliver must be seething.

7/10

Maze, Mayfair

It was the best of meals, it was the worst of meals. In fact in the end, it wasn't quite either, it was just maddeningly, bewilderingly inconsistent, and giving an overall score to a sequence of small dishes, 50% of which were excellent and 50% horrible, served half in daylight and half in increasing pitch blackness, accompanied by service that veered between winningly professional and laughably incompetent, will prove quite a challenge. Let's see how we do.


First of all, the traditional Ramsay velouté starter. Perfectly pleasant, with a miniscule amount of lobster meat but with an interesting if not wholly successful cold parmesan ice cream thingy (OK, a "parfait"). As with so many of Ramsay's sub-3* dishes, it's admirable if not entirely loveable. A bit like the man himself, in fact.


The first proper course was a neat little row of marinated beetroot and cheese constructions. These were pretty good for a vegetarian dish - the sharpness of the marinated veg was balanced nicely with the rich cheese and pine nuts added some pleasant texture. Nothing too extraordinary though.


Up next, the famous Maze signature dish of an ironic 'BLT' - that is, tomato gelée, bacon onion cream and lettuce velouté. An ambitious dish (just look at the recipe) and one with a weight of expectation behind it, I'm afraid I was slightly underwhelmed. It was fine, just absolutely nothing more than you might think cold tomato jelly, bacon bits and lettuce soup would taste like. The best bit, in fact, was the accompanying croque monsieur, which was a perfectly balanced and strongly flavoured cheese and ham toastie. And who doesn't like a cheese and ham toastie?


So, from the ridiculous to the sublime. The next course of pork belly, pig's head, crackling and jasmine tea was a pleasingly powerful mix of flavours and textures. The jasmine "tea", in particular, was as good a sauce I have had for a very long time, rich and satisfying with an incredibly deep, complex flavour. The pork belly was slightly on the chewy side but tasted good enough, and the crackling was delicate and fun to eat. I can only apologise for the photo, my poor iPhone by this time battling with the bizarre compulsion of the staff to turn the house lights down every ten minutes. I should also mention that a vegetarian dining companion had by this time been served a full four out of five dishes garnished with pea shoots. If you are a vegetarian and want to eat at Maze, you'd better like pea.



So from the sublime, back to the ridiculous. Roasted Anjou pigeon was a disappointingly stringy cut of breast meat (I nearly pulled a muscle trying to cut the damn thing up), with a wobbly skin and an overly sharp red wine sauce. Sadly, that wasn't the worst thing about it though. Through the murk of the restaurant lighting (they had turned them down again) I noticed an ominous black blob of something very dark perched on top of the pigeon breast. Thinking it would be some sort of marinated fruit or braised vegetable, I popped it in my mouth. My stomach instantly heaved in reaction to a huge blob of bitter chocolate, sickly and overwhelming and completely unsuitable in this amount to the rest of the dish. Even if the pigeon had been good quality (it wasn't) or cooked well (it wasn't), the baffling addition of half a pound of raw 70% chocolate as a 'garnish' to this meat was a complete disaster. Adding a small amount of chocolate to liven up a red wine sauce or chilli con carne is perfectly acceptable. Dumping such a relatively huge amount onto a dish such as this (bearing in mind these are all small tasting plates) is a frankly unforgivable mistake. Awful.


Unbelievably, the house lights dropped yet again before the arrival of the pre-dessert, which was a lovely shot of lemon sorbet sat on top of an incredibly strongly flavoured lime and passion fruit jelly. Served with it was a perfectly moist almond financier (cake). I was beginning to feel dizzy by this point, and it wasn't just because I couldn't see the floor. How could the same kitchen that considered it acceptable to turn out that chocolate pigeon monstrosity also produce such an interesting and exciting dessert?


The final course was served in near-darkness. The ironically-titled "peanut butter and cherry jam sandwich" was nothing of the sort, it was just a pleasant combination of peanut-flavoured ice cream and cherry jam and sorbet. I would like to tell you it was presented well, but I could hardly see it - I just blindly hacked away in front of me with my spoon until it eventually came back empty. It tasted fine, but as the saying goes we eat with our eyes first, and if I wanted to dine in the dark I would have booked elsewhere.

I will also say a word about our waiters. The front of house was professional and sharp, and the sommelier friendly and helpful. But in between periods of excellent service was an incident where a member of our table (I wasn't drinking, for a change) was shown his empty wine bottle and asked (actually more like mumbled) something about wanting another one. This was, bear in mind, well after we had finished our last savoury course. Given a firm no, he slunk off, then another member of staff immediately returned and poured nearly a full glass of wine out of what suspiciously looked like the same "empty" bottle. Now, I wouldn't suggest for a moment they had swapped the bottles to make it look empty the first time, but even so the implication, without us being asked to examine the bottle closely, was that it was empty. And I wonder - had we had said yes to another bottle when first asked, would that final glass from the first bottle have mysteriously disappeared?

The final insult, as is sadly so often the case, was the bill. I had barely more than a sniff of our single bottle of wine between the three of us, from the lower end of the wine list, and we only ate the "recommended" number of dishes - that is, 7 small plates of food each. And yet the bill came to nearly £100 per person. This is too way much to feel like good value when there are such glaring errors in the cooking. Perhaps, if you went every day for a couple of weeks and worked your way through the myriad of dishes you'd eventually be able to construct a flow of their best offerings and be able to enjoy a reasonably consistent evening. But by that time not only would you still only have a solid single Michelin-star meal but you'd have permanently damaged your eyesight and be about £1000 worse off. So your best bet is just to go to one of the many other much better restaurants in this price range. And that, sad to say, is pretty much all of them.

4/10