It's probably fair to say Gordon Ramsay is the most famous chef in the world at present, so his restaurant in The Ritz Carlton was eagarly anticipated. Head chef Paul Carroll cooked with Gordon in London, so the menu features his own creations along with Ramsay's own signature dishes. High end opulence and good service match excellent food, and there is a two course lunch for €30. Paolo went along with friend Alexis.
It’s a big building, but the approach to it somewhat disguises the fact. The façade you come to is three storey, but the back of building is five storey since it’s built on a slope looking south towards the Sugar Loaf. The entrance lobby is impressive enough, opening up at the far end to big windows offering fine views. A curving staircase takes you down one flight to where the restaurant is, which also looks over towards the Sugar Loaf. It’s a big room, but the tables in it are well-spaced so it seats about seventy maximum. For such a large space the ceiling might seem low, but clever uplighting concealed in coving stops it from being oppressive.
As soon as you sit you know you’re in an expensive space. There’s good napery on the table, the cutlery looks classic, the glassware is Riedl and the crockery is Limoges. I’d been unable to get a dinner reservation as they were fully booked for quite a while, so I’d arrived for lunch with my friend Alexis Mitchel. We were shown to a table by the window and got the wine list. This gave me something to read while Alexis had to listen to my comments. It’s a long list and very heavily marked up, so finding wines under €40 a bottle means a lot of page turning. Since both of us were driving we decided eventually to have a glass each of red and white from the page of wines by the glass. Two glasses of Chilean Lapostolle Sauvignon Blanc from the Casablanca Valley and then two glasses of New Zealand Pinot Noir looked like a good idea, but we still had no idea of what we might be eating.
This appeared not be an oversight, since looking around the restaurant every other recently arrived table had wine lists but no menus. It seems a curious policy to me, I like to pick my wine to suit my food, not the other way round. I had to ask for menus, which gave us two options: a tasting menu ‘Prestige’ at €100 a head or an à la carte. We picked from the à la carte, a cep risotto at €20 for Alexis and the veal sweetbreads at €24 for me as starters followed by the rack of lamb for Alexis at €42 and roast partridge for me at €39.
You can see that prices here are up with the best of them, so naturally my expectations were set high. The food we were presented with was definitely five star. Our starters, the risotto and the sweetbreads, were faultless. Alexis’ rack of lamb was excellent and only my partridge gave me pause for thought. Well cooked, well flavoured, but in itself curiously bland. No taste of game at all. That could well be to the taste of many, but I expect game to have a flavour of the wild.
We ended our lunch with a shared panna cotta, also well up to five star standard. Decent espressos too, which we sipped on the terrace outside in the warm autumn sun.
