Gordon Ramsay

I ate too much this summer. Not just slightly too much, but massively too much - so much that I've spent the last few days claiming, through the unfortunate crumbs of my thousandth croissant, that I'm going to undertake a fruit diet for the rest of August. Given all that gluttony, you wouldn't have thought that the prospect of one or two more restaurants would have excited me particularly. But I managed to gather my battered resources of enthusiasm for Gordon Ramsay's flagship restaurant in Kensington, its trademark purple canopy demurely tucked into an exclusive neighborhood off Royal Hospital Road. Not only is Ramsay famous, mostly for being deeply unpleasant on his eponymous reality show, but his restaurant is one of only two 3 Michelin starred restaurants in London. This would be the clear highlight of the summer, I thought - my first experience with the highest reaches of culinary expertise.
I'm pleased to say that Ramsay is as good as people say he is, and his restaurant is better. The eight course tasting menu, particularly, is a masterpiece of French cookery. Frankly, I wouldn't recommend a restaurant as expensive as Gordon Ramsay if you only got one meal out of your visit. But for me, at least, a meal as great as Ramsay's effort that night gets replayed over and over - like now, as I write this snapshot, and later, as I sit my way through a lesser meal, and perhaps twenty times more, in class, and at home, and in an absent moment six months from now, as I think back to one of the dishes that particularly struck my imagination.
I could begin my description of the food with one of ten dishes, petit fours and amuses bouches included. But the strident foie gras, encircled with deeply aged balsamic vinegar, was really amazing - one of these tastes that reminds you why people like something like foie gras. It's true that the chef has relatively little to do with such a dish, but there's a skill in knowing when you've got your hands on good ingredients too, and just letting people go at them, experience them the way they're supposed to taste. There were two fish dishes I remember particularly too - powerful king scallops layered with black truffle, as if you didn't get the flavorful point - and a masterful halibut layere with what they told me was lettuce sauce, like a sort of loose pesto, but subtler.
Between that, and the pre-dessert of pear soup with ginger foam, one might think that Ramsay had crossed the line between pretentious and merely fancy. But that's the skill of Ramsay I think. He's not blind to the trends infecting the most modern cooking, especially out of New York and Barcelona - the foams, the powders, the bizarre sauces and savoury ice creams. For the most part,he's rejected that gimmicky stuff in favor of the highest execution of the best food. But occasionally, he's adopted a thing or two from the pretentious myriads, a flourish, a technique. Despite what I normally write about such food, I think he's right. Cooking ought not be entirely a static exercise -if that was the case, we'd still be eating mounds of saffron tinged eggs and gold leaf, like our medieval precursors seemed to enjoy. Cooking changes. The role people like Gordon Ramsay play is to distill that change - to sort through the thousands of innovations, to grant their impimatur to the best, and to meld the new foods into traditional cuisine, so that thirty years from now no one would give his food a second, suspicious, glance. That, for example, is precisely why that foam didn't feel out of place just after the most traditional of seared beef, accompanied by minute, perfectly caramelized vegetables - or why a meal involving lettuce sauce went well with a great stalwart of the french dessert table, a magnifcient, dark, tarte tatin - powerful and yet understated. Ramsay's cooking mixes the traditional - the financiers of almond and the magnificent cheese board of some 30 varieties, with the new - petit fours of ice cream, and amuse bouches of butter cornets filled with creme fraiches and caviar- and he does so with skill , and without complication. I can't think of too many better compliments.
But a restaurant of this exalted a reputation and a stratospheric price can't survive merely on food. Bad service would be devastating- not because the food would taste any less excellent, but because there would be something gnawing at the back of your mind. Why is this course slower than the other - why can't they remember who ordered what? Try as I might to conclude otherwise, though, Gordon Ramsay is just about flawless. The service is well coordinated, and led by a frenchman who would be stereotypical if he were only ruder. The wine list, so far as I understood it, is of astounding quality, navigated effortlessly by an expert sommelier. If you've got exceptionally deep pockets, like we seemed to, order a wine with every course - it's an experience I'd love to have again, though you had better be good about holding your drink. Of course, if you do go too far, Gordon Ramsay gives the impression that they wouldn't care - it would be all papered over with class, and perhaps an extra nibble to sop up the spare drink. Because that's simply the kind of place Gordon Ramsay is - just about flawless, and very close to magnificent. I, personally, would have traded the whole summer of eating for another go at their table.