It’s the place everyone’s been talking about. Gordon Ramsay’s new ‘Asian’ restaurant, on the site of the once-trailblazing Maze. As always, we gave it a few months to ‘bed in’ and went incognito, to give you an honest, accurate report.
And you know what? It was better than expected. Specifically, the food is excellent. Lucky Cat originally launched with a lot of schtick – for which they got a lot of stick – about the ‘authenticity’ of the cooking, but they’ve thankfully ditched all those affectations. Instead, it is, simply put, a place to eat a pimped pick ’n’ mix of all your fashionable pan-Asian faves, from sushi, buns, skewers and dumplings to Burmese curry or Laotian salad. This kind of please-all approach, what I like to call a ‘room service’ menu, usually means one thing: crap food. Not so here. Each dish was prettily plated, with careful, nuanced flavours.
(Star picks: razor clam sashimi with Liliputian apple balls and waves of yuzu; sweet and sticky pork belly on rice; earthy and smooth-middled snail and watercress dumplings ).
So what’s the issue? Well, it’s not the prices: this is prime Mayfair after all (though giving the option to add caviar or truffle to any dish is just tacky). But its soul. Or rather, lack of. Someone has spent a lot of money to make this place feel like the restaurant of a Dubai hotel, complete with monotone beats.
As for the staff, they were unduly polite, but perilously slow. Worse: they wouldn’t stop trying to ‘upsell’ (one attempt is good business, more than that is not okay). I’m sure Lucky Cat will do just fine. I just wish it were on Deliveroo.