Contrary to popular belief, Gordon Ramsay has not always been London’s culinary supremo. Before Gordo’s reign began, there was another chef whose standards for many years put him clearly at the top of the London tree, and that chef was Pierre Koffmann.
His reign ended in 1998, when he sold the Chelsea site which is now Gordon Ramsay SW3 to… well, you can guess. La Tante Claire then moved to the Berkeley Hotel. Described in Harden’s as “wrong, cold and expensive”, the restaurant never thrived there, and it shut up shop in 2003. (The site subsequently became Pétrus SW1.) Little has been heard in public of Koffmann, who has been working as a consultant, ever since, though there have been perennial rumours of some sort of return.
Well, now he really is back, says Eat Out magazine, and planning a simple brasserie. Details, however, are “still under wraps”: let’s hope those wraps come off real soon.
PS (1 November) The Financial Times reports that Koffmann is now consulting at the Bleeding Heart EC1; it’s not clear if this is instead of – or as well as – a brasserie of his own.
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