Carlo Scotto’s Bear: ‘a completely different beast’

Highly praised chef Carlo Scotto will make his comeback this spring after an 18-month break with a new, ingredient-led restaurant at the Crazy Bear hotel in Beaconsfield – and he promises it will be a “completely different beast” from the two ambitious London restaurants where he wowed critics and diners, Amethyst in Mayfair and Xier in Marylebone.

The new restaurant comes as part of the relaunch of the Crazy Bear under a new ownership structure announced this week. Along with its sister hotel in Stadhampton, near Oxford, the hotel has been acquired in a buy-out by its management, MD Tom Etridge and executive director Richard Booth, providing stable ownership and funding that allows them to develop their vision.

The original Crazy Bear in Stadhampton, founded by Jason Hunt in 1993, will host a ‘British fine-dining’ restaurant called Oak under Chris Emery, former head chef at Jason Atherton’s New York outpost The Clocktower, which is to open this spring.

Bear by Carlo Scotto will follow and marks a change of direction for the Naples-born chef, whose sometimes eccentric talents have been hailed by critics including the Guardian’s Grace Dent and Giles Coren of The Times. The June 2023 closure of Amethyst, just a year after its launch, was a “challenging blow” which left Carlo feeling “in a dark place, trying to reach out to those around me, but always feeling misunderstood”.

But, he added in a post on social media, “After a period of reflection, I have now come back stronger , more passionate and more obsessed than I could ever have imagined.

Bear by Carlo Scotto will be my new venture, This will be version 2.0 of my creativity, innovation and there will be no boundaries, foraging our own ingredients where farmers and artisans will be the true artists, providing us with the finest quality ingredients.

“As a great chef once told me, ‘world class dishes cannot be created with world class ingredients’. I now live by this philosophy.”

Carlo added that his new restaurant would operate as a chef’s table that would “redefine the farm-to-fork concept” – “we’re back with a bang!”

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