The Ritz
The Ritz Restaurant London Review at-a-glance
Awards: One Michelin star
Verdict: I can not fathom how Michelin only gives Chef John William’s cooking at the Ritz restaurant only 1-star. It displays the highest degree of craftsmanship and plenty of personality from a chef who tirelessly cooks classic French dishes. Most importantly, the food here is a joy to eat which is something I can not always say about Michelin restaurants. Ingredients are luxurious and treated carefully. Plates are rich but with balance and finesse. While the flavors and presentations are not as daring as most three star restaurants, the results are just as good. This is a restaurant I will happily return to each time I am in London.
Rating: 95/100
Visited: November 2022
Price I Paid: £175 for the longest, 7-course tasting menu (plus 12.5% service charge)
Value: 14/20
The Ritz Restaurant London and Chef John Williams Background
The Ritz is the grand dame of London hotels, an institution that has had many famous guests over the years including politicians, royals and socialites. A beacon of tradition, a strict dress code is enforced throughout the hotel with jeans, shorts, and sneakers not allowed in any of the bars or restaurants. While I am not a fan of this kind of stuffiness, it does create an elegant environment that is accentuated by the hotel’s grand furnishing including the dining room with its sparkling chandeliers, ornate art, and floor to ceiling windows.
Like the hotel, executive chef John Williams sticks with tradition by creating timeless and labor intensive classical French dishes. This type of cooking is very appropriate given the hotel’s original proprietor, César Ritz, had a long standing partnership with Auguste Escoffier who is broadly known for creating the modern fine dining kitchen in the 19th century. You won’t find any passing culinary fads here but this is a kitchen that stays true to itself and cooks its chosen style perfectly.
The Ritz restaurant has many menu options including a la carte, 5 and 7-course tasting menus, and a three-course prix fix lunch (£77). A few years ago, the seven-course menu cost only £125 which made it one of the best bargains in fine dining (especially when you consider the Ritz stuck to tradition and omitted the service fees that are in vogue in London these days). Sadly, the cost of the 7-course menu has increased by £50 and the hotel has started to add a 12.5% service charge (somewhat hilarious given the strong statement they previously made against this). In total, this brings the full cost of the longest menu before wine to £195, a more than 50% increase in only a few years. While it is no longer a steal, this is still a fair price for the quality of food, luxury ingredients, and environment offered.
The Ritz wine menu is readily available online and features quite a few wines by the glass with a mixture of reasonably priced ones around £15-£20 and more prestigious estates served via Coravin. If you have the time, I also recommend stopping by the excellent Rivoli Bar which oozes old-world class. While it has a number of classic cocktails inspired by the history of the Ritz, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t try one of its more modern seasonal cocktails as an aperitif.
What I ate at the Ritz London
As is the tradition at the Ritz, the first bites of the meal were ragstone cheese mousse with wood pepper and basil and duck liver parfait with sour cherry and yogurt. These are not earth shattering snacks but executed at the absolute highest level, the cherry cutting through the richness of the liver and the mild goat cheese carefully selected to not be too strong.
Even better than the classic nibbles was a tartare of beef with Oscietra caviar. Raw beef and caviar is a classic flavor profile and here it shined as all of the ingredients were pristine and the tart holding them had wonderful texture. At the same time the tart was brought out, a dressed Colchester oyster was finished with a spritz of champagne and herb oil tableside. While I quite liked the presentation, ultimately this was a relatively boring combination and not in the same class as the other nibbles. Champagne goes with oysters like peas in a pod but I think it is better to chase an oyster with a glass of champagne than slurp them down at the same time.
The first course was raw Isle of Mull scallop served with bergamot and avocado. Beautiful scallops were sliced thinly and served with a dressing of finger lime, soy, and bergamot. This sounds simple but the dressing was spot on, adding just enough acidity to wake up the scallops without being too strong. The scallops themselves were also of a very high standard with tons of natural sweetness that was complimented by the other components. With fresh and bright flavors, this was the perfect way to kick off the meal.
A classic of Chef John Williams is a ballotine of duck liver with damson and pistachio. The description belies just how much effort goes into making this dish, the liver marinated in sauternes, port and armagnac for a day before being wrapped in spiced port jelly and served with a bit of damson plum jelly and pistachio yogurt. Rounding out the dish is a flawless piece of buttery brioche and a small pistachio Bakewell tart. It is impossible to overstate just how good this is, the foie being smooth and having a remarkable depth of flavor which can only be achieved by sourcing the best foie possible (from Landes, France) and enhancing it further. Wrapping the foie in the jelly was brilliant, ensuring you got a nice balance of foie and jelly in each bite on the brioche. This is one of the finest foie gras dishes around and one that I would happily eat over and over again.
The main fish course was cornish turbot cooked “veronique” style which consists of giving the fish a strong searing before turning it over and basting with butter, lemon, rosemary and bay leaves to add some flavor. The well cooked fillet of fish was served with peeled grapes and a verjus vermouth sauce that was poured table side. It is not every day you see whole grapes plated in a Michelin restaurant but they were actually an inspired choice, adding a burst of acidity to balance out the butter used to cook the fish and make the sauce. This was a much better turbot dish than the one I had at Core a few days before hand.
We left the sea with a somewhat simply plated piece of veal sweatbread with parmesan and truffle sauces added tableside. While this was not the most attractive dish, one can only wonder about the sheer amount of hours that went into making the two laborious sauces. The sweetbread was steamed until tender and then given a roast in butter before being glazed in truffle sauce. This gave a great smooth texture to the sweetbreads and subtle flavor although I prefer a more crispy style of sweetbread cooking. The parmesan sauce, made by infusing milk with the rind of 36 month aged cheese, was almost unbearably rich by itself but somehow worked when combined with the also rich Perigord truffle sauce. When combined, both sauces were deeply flavorful and stopped just short of cloying. If looking for areas to improve, there could have been another component added to the plate such as a vegetable or something with acidity to make it a more complete dish. That said, it was still a great sweetbread dish that shined in its simplicity.
The main course was a take on another classic French dish, Anjou pigeon served a la presse. While I have seen “presses” many times (the most sought after of which are silver plated ones made by Christofle in the late 19th/early 20th century), this was my first experience trying a dish made with one. An entire pigeon was brought out and carved tableside to remove the breast while the carcass was placed in the press to extract all of the blood and juices. The resulting liquid was then flambéed tableside with brandy and stirred vigorously to create a deeply flavorful sauce. The sauce was then spooned over the breast which was plated with a bit of salt baked kholrabi for earthiness and served with a side of pomme soufflé. Besides offering quite the show, the dish was delicious as the pigeon was expertly cooked and the sauce exactly what you want - glossy, full of flavor and balanced out by the green peppercorns.
The first dessert was cox apple with sauternes and vanilla. While not uncommon, I hate the presentation of just laying foam across the top of a dish as I find it a bit lazy. Underneath though, there was plenty of goodness with the dessert making me reminisce of a much better version of apple pie than I thought possible. The main dessert was salted hazelnut with praline and milk ice cream. Like the rest of the meal, the execution was high and the flavors were very comforting as this was essentially a very elevated take on a snickers bar. Sweet but not overly so, I enjoyed this quite a lot but found it a tad too safe.