There wouldn't be any need for us to starve in the gutters

We had a three course lunch menu (for £21) at Gordon Ramsey´s Maze Grill while visiting London. Maze Grill is one of Ramsey´s restaurants in London, modelled after, and inspired by, classic New York steak houses. We had booked our lunch early, when we were planning our four day visit to the city. We thought it was time to check one of man´s restaurants as his face seems to all around telly these days in Finland (couple of years late from rest of the world).

Decor of Maze Grill is pretty simple, plain and quite relaxing actually. Guests wait in separate bar area when they arrive to the restaurant and are led to tables when everything is ready. Service was ok, there were many waiters and waitress' present, but some of them seemed quite confused and didn´t know what they were supposed to do exactly. Everything worked well from starters to dessert, but when it was time to pay, everybody seemed to vanish and were not interested to check us out and take new customers in. There was a mistake in our bill, which was corrected with huge apologies, so we were not too upset about it. Clientele seemed to include workers from nearby offices, your usual business lunch people and food tourists like us, snapping photos of the foods.  

Lunch menu started with sardine bruschetta, complemented by cherry tomatoes and rocket salad. This small starter was quite good, but toast was little bit burnt, the crust rather hard (almost impossible to cut with a knife) and rocket salad was too oily for our taste. For mains we had 6oz rump of beef with Béarnaise sauce and chips and salad. Steak was tender, good and medium, like we asked, but side dishes were just too salty. You might expect chips to be salty, but these were just too salty. Salad was also ruined by too much oil and salt. Garlic mayo and Béarnaise were spiced up with thyme, rather pungent and controling taste in this dish, since roasted garlic, which was served with main course was garnished with it too. Side garlic seemed to give most of the eaters some grief, since you had to dig out the cloves out with your knife (not so easy, if it's your first time).

Then it was time for dessert. Bean had marengue with raspberry sauce and Crumpet took selection of British cheeses. Marengue was nice, although little bit too hard on the top and raspberry sauce was good. Crumpet´s British cheeses were not selected very well and certainly not for average taste. Crumpet is a little cheese lover and always ready to try new cheeses, but these were too much. Blue cheese had too again too salty and manurelike taste. Goat cheese was rather young and again, pungent. Best of the selection was soft cowmilk cheese, which was rather plain in the end.

All in all it was nice to try out a "celebrity chef" restaurant and to see what the fuss is all about. In this case, we might ask, is it much ado about nothing? 

By Bean & Crumpet