Arch One

Press Reviews (3)

• Fay Maschler (30th October 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  Fay sets the scene for her review of this restaurant and bar opposite Waterloo’s main entrance with a pre-amble on Gordon Ramsay, in whose kitchens the chef here, 25-year-old Gemma Tuley, was schooled and once groomed by GR Holding’s PR-machine for great things. When the critic calls to book a table, the manager is “seemingly amazed” as the venue “feels like a place for after-work drinking”. Ensconced on the mezzanine, the critic was “at one blessed remove from the thudding music and madding crowd”. The only off-note in the food is somewhat under-cooked oxtail. Otherwise “the hand of a practised chef” is evident despite the unlikely location and the fact that her “acquired skills plus a large dollop of inspiration… give people what they want at a price they can afford is most certainly progress”, we are told. In fact, if Fay had liked the setting more, she sounds like she’d have awarded 4 stars.
• Jan Moir (30th October 2008)
  
  The critic’s experience of this converted arch “opposite the majestic front entrance to Waterloo Station” could not be more at odds with the upbeat report by the Evening Standard’s Fay Maschler just the day before. “What is chef Gemma Tuley doing slumming it” here she asks, although Gemma was not in the kitchen when she visits “which is kinda worrying on the second week of opening”. With “its view of urban architecture” she finds some things to like in the place, but not the “vintage blobs of blackened chewing gum” on the floor. Eating upstairs above the 24-hour bar, “the concept is good food for less cash”. She really doesn’t find it! One dish evokes “a nightmare about Jordan’s sunburned buttocks”. Nice. A stew is “twin peaks of unique horror”. Service provides no relief, being “a bit weird, not to say unhelpful at times”. After such a poor meal, she asks “what further proof do you need that cheap is not necessarily good”.
• Richard Vines (17th October 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  Ex-Ramsay chef Gemma Tuley, 25, is – notes the critic – “a young chef with the kind of resume most rivals never build up in a lifetime”. Her new joint, by Waterloo station, “feels more like a wine bar, with slightly hit-and-miss service and music that plays just a bit too loud”, but her food almost invariably satisfies. “[A]s Ramsay and other chefs start to focus on more casual dining, they might take a look at what Tuley is doing, and learn.”