An Open Letter to Gordon Ramsay

Dear Mr. Ramsay,

I visited your restaurant Bread Street Kitchen last night. We sat at a table across from you, I was the one with the husband who kept telling me to stop leering. Anyway, I am writing you because I was not impressed - to put it mildly.

I had moderate expectations for your restaurant Bread Street Kitchen. After all, you have those Michelin stars and really cool hair. Plus, the restaurant has a smart menu and the building itself sits in the shadow of St. Paul's Cathedral - which is lovely to look at at night on the walk to the restaurant. Additionally, the Timeout review was favorable. I was ready for a nice meal.

But with all due respect to your 14 or 15 Michelin stars.....dinner was shit. From start to finish, it was total shit. And I am a polite Midwesterner. I generally believe in all that, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" BS. But I feel mad, bloated, and slightly more poor (poorer?)......so the gloves are coming off!

As you know Mr. Ramsay, the restaurant is upstairs and the bar is on the ground floor. We arrived at 8:00 for our reservation, but decided we wanted to have a drink at the bar first. Maybe the bartender could let the restaurant know? Maybe like take 3 seconds to call upstairs and let them know we'd be in at 8:30 instead? Nope, Mr. Bartender just looked at us as though we were stupid because he was clearly so busy (the bar was empty). Uhm, OK no biggie - I ran upstairs and quickly moved us back 30 minutes. Easy as that, I am not a primadonna. I really wasn't actually bothered by a trip up four flights of stairs to move our reservation, until THE REST OF THE NIGHT WAS TOTAL SHIT too.

You probably saw that your staff was breathlessly flittering around trying to look busy/important/whatever. But they weren't actually doing their jobs. If you actually wanted to ORDER something, you had to flag someone down - which is rather humiliating when you are paying to be served. It wasn't just us, the table next door had to to the same. At first I just thought they were rude, frantically waving the waiter down - nope, they were just hungry......and smart. Because apparently you cannot get anything to eat or drink in that restaurant without doing the arm-raised-anxiously-waving-like-a-second-grader thing.

Really I have never seen a bigger server shitshow, and I worked at the Elephant Bar for 4 years, so that is saying something.

Sadly, the food was just meh. I had a tiny portion of mackerel as a starter (the restaurant was out of the scallops I originally wanted). For my main, I had an equally tiny roasted vegetable salad - which was £13 for some lettuce and 3 pieces of oversalted, roasted squash. I wanted to cry......then order a pizza. My husband had a Caesar salad that was 80% croutons, then an overcooked steak about the size of my hand - before removing the gristle. The steak came with about two sad spoonfuls of potatoes. 

Our meal ended up being so expensive, I keep trying NOT to do the GBP to USD conversion for fear of having an aneurism. Really £21 for a glass of Malbec. Man, I am really depressed right now. 
  
To be clear, I am not a lame American who eats at the Cheesecake Factory because I like the menu and the gigantic portion sizes. I understand the value of moderate and even tiny portions when the food is comprised of exquisite ingredients, perfectly prepared. Sadly, my meal was neither exquisite nor well prepared.


I am left here today still feeling bitter. I'll never return to Bread Street Kitchen, and even worse - I will probably always have an aversion to your restaurants in general. 

Sincerely,

The Flying Monkeys