The Times
Camilla Long felt she had entered a “seductive, soothing, expensive, smoothly grinning money machine” as she was ushered into this grand art deco hotel dining room after what seems like its tenth relaunch since the departure of Gordon Ramsay – this time as an outpost of an Italianate café from Greenwich Village in New York.
The staff were ultra-solicitous, the senior ones “dressed like psychiatric hospital attendants, in high necks and long white Handmaid’s Tale sleeves”, creating an overall vibe Camilla summed up as “diminished responsibility”. Fittingly, the menu “feels as though it’s been decided by management consultants with degrees in psychology”.
As to the food, two dishes were “revelatory”: caviar tartlets and grilled chicken ‘alla diavola’, although the latter was “about as diavola as Kate Middleton’s hat drawer”, while the prawn cocktail tasted oddly sweet, as did the premixed martinis. But the real offence was the bill: Camilla reckoned almost £500 was a lot to pay for three people eating chicken, burger, Dover sole, some starters and drinks in a “clattery” place “among Americans whom the hotel only considers desirable because at least they aren’t Middle Easterners”.
Camilla Long - 2026-06-21The Times
Jay Rayner was scathing in his assessment of the New York import that has taken over the main dining room at Claridge’s, “the grandest of London’s art deco hotels, the one which launched the city’s hotel dining revolution with the Gordon Ramsay takeover in 2001”.
It is monumentally expensive, he said, and supplies “food for bored hotel residents who can’t summon the will to go elsewhere”. Most of the cooking “isn’t so much awful, as just dull”. The best dish of the night, a seared fillet of mackerel, is “tiny, as if portioned for the Ozempic crowd”. Possibly the worst is an £11 portion of chips consisting of “what amounts to one large potato cut into wedges, allegedly triple cooked. They are dense and spongy. There are few greater disappointments in this life than disappointing chips.”
“Around us, families, perhaps off flights from Dubai, pick listlessly at plates of lobster linguini.” Jay finishes his meal with today’s tart of the day, blackcurrant. “It is dry and lifeless as, by now, am I.”
Jay Rayner - 2026-08-23The Guardian
Grace Dent managed to find nice things to say about the New York import permanently installed in the main restaurant space at this grand hotel, going against the flow of reviewers who have given its arrival a critical mauling.
“It won’t win prizes for its food, but it is friendly and handy as hell,” she said, praising the “warm, slick, effusive and casual” service that makes the venue ideal for breakfasts, meet-ups, client lunches or intimate tête-à-têtes: “you could invite anyone here, and at any time.” And the prices are “weirdly reasonable” for Mayfair, even at £27 for a bowl of pasta: “you should see how much they charge for pasta at Bacchanalia just down the road”.
Most noteworthy is the ‘honey bee’ from the dessert cocktail list (tequila, coffee liqueur, amontillado, raspberry, salted honey cream) … “And wait, what? It comes with my own face printed on top of it!?! Dante has a piece of kit that stamps photographs on to the foam in edible ink, and I defy anyone not to be exhilarated by that.”
Grace Dent - 2026-10-04The Observer
Tanya Gold offered a very different view, saying she “struggled to see the point of Dante, at least in Claridge’s”: the new arrival failed to meet the challenge of this “dramatic Art Deco palace” – much as its predecessors, Simon Rogan’s rustic Fera, Daniel Humm’s Davies and Brook, and an in-house brasserie had also fallen short.
The culinary theme is “Italian-American food, which treats America as another province of Italy, and the smashburger as cherished regional dish”, and whose pasta (she agreed with Grace Dent) was “slightly overcooked”. Chicken alla diavola was “not particularly devilish”, and if the tiramisu was well done, the sticky toffee ‘donut’ was too much: “It’s a sugar coffin and I’m lying in it.”
The hotel, Tanya urged, must solve the riddle of what rich people want to eat, and in Mayfair. “Claridge’s needs the defining plutocrat restaurant, because nothing else will meet the interior, and the interior will not change. You should walk in and faint.”
Tanya Gold - 2026-10-04
Drinks
Extras
