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 - 2026-08-23
Drinks
Extras
