Bread street kitchen, 10 Bread Street, London EC4 (020 3030 4050). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £120
Look, my editor said, if you really love it you can have two pages. Otherwise we'll make it a single. Welcome, then, to my one-page review of Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant. To be frank Bread Street Kitchen is the kind of place only its mother could really love. It's like a late adolescent who's just discovered fashion. It's loud and brash and pleased with itself. If Bread Street Kitchen was a person they'd smell of Lynx. The space, in a new glass-and-steel development down the road from St Paul's Cathedral, is vast; so huge that the downstairs bar was empty all night, as if the laws of restaurant physics had sucked punters inexorably upwards to the great yawning maw of the first-floor dining room. It feels like a branch of All Saints; if they'd told me I could get a pair of jeggings on the other side I might have gone and had a look.
It's plain to see what Ramsay is attempting to do. Recently he's spent a lot of time in the States, where they have aced the classy urban brasserie; the sort of relaxed buzzy joint which still makes the food count. Some of that has been achieved here.
The wine list is strong and has some good choices at surprisingly low prices. We also ate some pleasing things from the long if overcomplicated menu, which roams from raw bar to hot kitchen to something called "wood stone". A king-crab cocktail had lots of pearly fresh meat, as it should do at £15 a pop. Steamed sea bass with a silky aubergine purée heavy with cumin was a very precise piece of cookery, and a grilled veal chop would have been a marvel if only it had been allowed to rest properly. A dessert of cinnamon and ricotta fritters was hot and sugary and naughty.
Too many other things weren't good enough. Sticky tamarind chicken wings had the thrill of being dirty food served up by the classy Ramsay, until we realised they were no better than the sort you'd buy when completely bladdered from some gnarly KFC knock-off joint in Dalston. And the mark-up! Five small second joints for £8. I asked my (bloody expensive but very good) butcher, who supplies restaurants, how much five free-range wing joints like this would cost from him: 41p. Let's assume Ramsay is getting a bad deal and paying 50% over the odds. Throw in some pennies for the marinade and work on 80p a portion. With VAT off and service on (stay with me here) that's a gross profit of almost 90%, as against an industry standard of 70%.
A side dish of Brussels tops with smoked bacon which amounts to barely more than a heaped dessert-spoonful cost £3.95 and raised the same thoughts. The issue is less the exact numbers, but whether you end up looking at a dish and questioning the value. Here you do.
The pasta in a tagliolini with crab, chilli and spring onions wasn't just al dente, it was undercooked. The slices of spring onion were hard and woody. The whole dish was underpowered. The bun and accessories with the £11.50 burger were fine, but the beef had been overminced to a paste, destroying both flavour and texture. Chips, another £3.50, are not included with the burger. A banana and maple upside-down cake, which feels like the hipster version of the tarte tatin that Ramsay serves everywhere else, was heavy and dull. Service was cheery, but dysfunctional. It took three requests to get them to stop attempting to fill our wine glasses. The bill had to go back twice to put on everything we'd had.
The thing is, I like late adolescents. I admire their bravado and front, and make allowances for all they have not yet learned. But it's hard to make allowances for this sort of adolescent when the bill hits £120 for two, as it does here. Still, hope springs eternal; I'm intrigued to see what Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen will be like if – and when – it grows up.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place. Follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
