Evening Standard
In a week when ‘fine dining’ emerged as a coincidental theme for reviewers, David Ellis was clearly in the mood to celebrate his elevation to the role of the Standard’s chief restaurant critic with a visit to the best restaurant in town (he had a further reason to celebrate, his partner, Twiggy, having accepted his proposal of marriage).
“The Ritz is the restaurant I routinely name as London’s best, because it is,” David declared. “Only no one ever believes me, on the grounds it’s too preposterously obvious to possibly be true. But it is. Accept no substitute, not even the afternoon tea.”
The restaurant scores on every front, he says, from its “cartoonishly grand” pink and gilt Louis XIV interior, via the well-drilled but resolutely un-stuck-up staff, to “food that leaves me fog-headed with pleasure”, gasping “did human hands really do all this?”
Executive chef John Williams has revolutionised The Ritz over two decades, so what is apparently old-school is now “anything but dated. He has bear-hugged tradition but created a sense of timelessness. Can there be cutting-edge classicism?”.
David Ellis - 2024-09-29The Times
In the third episode of his search for the holy grail of ‘fine dining’, Tim Hayward doubled up with former Sunday Times and Guardian critic Marina O’Loughlin for the second of this week’s mob-handed reviews, of a seven-course ‘Epicurean Lunch’ at The Ritz – erstwhile stomping ground of Auguste Escoffier, the chef who, as Tim reminded us, “wrote the book on fine dining”.
The pair agreed on their shared disdain for the present state of the genre – the “absurd menus of flash ‘nibbles with narratives’” paraded by young chefs around the country via “the echo chamber of ‘Chef Instagram’”, and the resultant “total loss of deliciousness”. Marina dated this disenchantment to her second visit to El Bulli, and the “tortured and denatured” food she ate there.
The meal started with an amuse bouche of Coronation chicken that “dabbed every cliché” of this reviled modern gastronomy with “every kind of twattery required, deconstruction, a ‘witty narrative’, a pointlessly novel presentation of a weary classic”… But – and there had to be a ‘but’ – “Also, frustratingly and thanks to the talents of John Williams (MBE), a classically and fully adult chef, it was bloody gorgeous.”
The rest of the meal lived up to this elevated standard, delighting both critics despite their initial reservations. By the end, Tim was left wondering what exactly “fine dining” is these days. Marina suggested a working definition: “Tweezers, multiple complex techniques and hushed reverence.”
Tim Hayward - 2024-10-13
