The 8th choice by Annette was the 3 Michelin star Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, where we for the first time decided to go back to a previous restaurant, as we were celebrating our dinner no. 30 and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay was until now our Top Choice.
We were all so excited to be back at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay after 12 years and it started well with the door man, who obviously did his homework and acknowledge our reservation by welcoming me by name. Unfortunately that fell apart as soon as we then entered the restaurant – as the people in reception did not do their homework and now I had to tell who I was.
We then probably got the worst table in the restaurant. Actually I was very happy to get a window seat – but I do not expect a table where one person get put in the corner and can only get out if someone else is standing up as well. That is not a 3 star Michelin experience for me as I am expecting all seats at a table to be easy accessible. Instead it feels like the restaurant is just cramping in too many people.
12 years ago the restaurant had an amazing German Head Sommelier who immediately understood the price range we were after and had no problem recommending and telling stories about different bottles of wine – but this time we barely got any help. We are normal people who love nice food and don’t mind spending a bit of money on that – but we cannot afford to spent £200 on a bottle of wine. It took a while for the Sommelier to even come up with some suggestions for a red and then I was just shown 3 bottles from the same region in Italy all around the £200 mark. When I said that this was too expensive I was given one other choice from Australia – but barely got any explanation about the wine – also it would have been nice to have a few choices as I am still not convinced we had the best red within our budget. For the white we got no help at all and again the wine list was not easy to navigate – so we were struggling but no one offered us any explanation or told us anything about how we could navigate through the wine list. The Assistant Sommelier was slightly better to explain a bit about the wine when it was served to us – but overall the Sommelier experience failed and again definitely not what we would expect from a 3 star Michelin restaurant.
We all went for the Surprise menu and I enjoyed most of it, whereas some of my friends where struggling with a few of the courses. However what we didn’t like was that we felt extremely rushed and twice we had to ask the restaurant to slow the courses down. We are going out to have a lovely experience, which we pay a lot of money for and normally we spent 4-5 hours in the restaurant as we like to have proper time to enjoy the food and each other’s company. This time the room felt more like a train station with too many people rushing around and not with a nice relaxing atmosphere, where we could fully enjoy our meal like we did last time.
While booking the table the restaurant asked if we were celebrating anything special and I told them about our ‘Michelin club’, that we have been running since 2011 and that we were celebrating our restaurant no. 30 at our so far Top restaurant. This obviously was no big deal for them – but for us this is quite a thing and we thought they would have acknowledged that. Except for a welcome back – we didn’t see anything to say that they recognised the celebration we were having. I could have told them that we were also celebrating my 50th from last month – but thought I would just mention one thing – obviously I mentioned the wrong one as they might have been more willing to recognise a birthday celebration.
Finally when we got the bill I think we all 4 nearly had a heart attack. I know the Surprise menu was £260 per person – but we didn’t go crazy on the wine – so it never occurred to me that the total bill would be over £1700 or more than £400 per person. I guess if the whole night had been amazing then it would have been different – but we just felt there was so many things that did not match that the restaurant is still holding 3 Michelin stars and it was way overpriced for what we got.
I couldn’t help raising a complaint about our whole experience with the restaurant the following day and wrote to them a pretty similar story to what I have said above. To be fair the restaurant did send me a nice reply and said they took my feedback very seriously. We also ended up getting our 15% service charge paid back to us – so a small compensation for a very disappointing night unfortunately. Afraid we won’t be back anytime soon,
