Chaotic service, high prices and unremarkable sort-of-Japanese food at Gordon Ramsay’s new Mayfair restaurant
Several people were perplexed as to why Gordon Ramsay would feel pressed to open a gargantuan, Japanese-ish restaurant, his first venture of this genre, and place it in Mayfair, the most prohibitively expensive area of London. Yet, of a Friday evening in July, soon after Lucky Cat’s many dozen welcoming maneki-neko felines began waggling their paws on the walls, I scanned his new venture’s heaving room and thought, “Ah, yes, this all makes perfect sense.”
My teensy plate of prawn toast had just arrived: four circular, 50p-sized lumps of prawn toast laced with sesame kimchi for eight quid. A white geisha – vodka, sake syrup, yuzu – arrives with its frothy egg white embossed rather eerily with an ornate, electric-blue geisha’s face that will not dissolve regardless of how hard one slurps. Around me, a buoyant crowd – a mix of moneyed tourist couples, business dinners and special-occasion parties – are flinging money hand over fist at single duck legs caked in bonito and served with a bao bun (which is northern Chinese).
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