Gordon Ramsay is charging a stunning £675 for New Year’s Dinner at his triple Michelin-starred flagship London restaurant – the third most expensive in the world
Gordon Ramsey has set an astonishing price tag of £675 to dine at his three-Michelin-starred flagship restaurant in London on New Year’s Eve.
The celebrity chef released the menu sample for his Restaurant Gordon Ramsay at Chelsea’s Royal Hospital Road – previously named the third-most-expensive eatery in the world – which shows diners set to fork out a whopping £400 per person.
For any wine pairing to bring in the new year, customers will be set back an extra £275 per head.
The menu sample includes dishes such as Orkney scallops, duck tea, roast veal sweetbread and dover sole cardinal served with potato, lobster and chive.
Other restaurants owned by the TV chef are also offering New Year’s Eve spreads, with London restaurant Pétrus offering a slightly cheaper alternative for £300.
Ready for the festive season ahead, the chef is also charging £275 a head for Christmas dinner at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, with drinks extra.
The Christmas day sample menu features confit egg and lobster ravioli, followed by a choice of dover sole or Cumbrian venison.
On top of this, Ramsey has also put together a seven-course menu for the Savoy hotel where the Christmas menu comes in at £275 per person.
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay was previously named the third-most-expensive eatery in the world.
Price of meals at UK’s top restaurants more than DOUBLES in six years: How diners face average bills of £200-per-person at five-star favourites… with London’s Araki charging £380-a-head
The UK’s top restaurants are becoming increasingly unaffordable as record price rises mean that even £100 is not enough for a top tier meal.
The price of a meal at the UK’s best restaurants has more than doubled over the past six years since Brexit – costing an average of £200 per person.
The cost-of-living crisis, staff shortages and soaring food prices as well as the industry suffering due to the Covid pandemic have all had an effect.
While food inflation hit a record 11.6 per cent in October, driving up costs from within, restaurants have also faced a higher cost of hiring staff since Brexit, and an overall staff shortage since the pandemic.
In Harden’s London Restaurant Guide, they raised the top price category from £100 to £130 per head, with the former now reserved for the second tier.
The 2023 edition includes 15 restaurants in the capital with a guide price of more than £200 a head, compared with six in that bracket this year.
The general rate of increase was a record in the last decade and the highest in the 20 years since 2000.
Peter Harden, the editor of the restaurant guide, said: ‘We’ve gone very quickly from a time five years ago when charging over £100 a head was the outlier, to now, when for the very top restaurants £200 pounds a head is becoming the norm.
‘It feels like everything is speeding up. That’s because it is.’
In the UK as a whole, the restaurant guide will list 12 venues outside London charging more than £200 a head, compared with eight this year.
This includes Britain’s most expensive restaurant Ynyshir Hall in Ceredigion, Wales where they boast a 32 course taster menu costing £410 a head.
Harden’s Best UK Restaurants for 2023 describes the two Michelin star restaurant as a ‘major darling of the UK fooderati’, but says that many of its reviewers now regard it as ‘ridiculously overpriced’.
The average cost per person at this top restaurant has increased by nearly 68 per cent since 2019 – when diners could visit for £139.
Peter Harden, the editor of the restaurant guide, said: ‘We’ve gone very quickly from a time five years ago when charging over £100 a head was the outlier, to now, when for the very top restaurants £200 pounds a head is becoming the norm.’ Pictured: The Araki, where the average price per head is £380
Meanwhile at Kitchen Table in London, where the average cost per person is £330, there has been a 53 per cent increase since 2019 when the average price was £166.
Mr Harden said: ‘If you go back to our first post-Brexit London edition in 2017, then there was just a single restaurant costing more than £150, now there are 37, and there are 154 in the guide above the £100 level.
‘This phenomenon is not restricted to London. The most expensive formula price in our UK guide this year is £430, for Ynyshir in Wales.’
He added, with reference to Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in Berkshire: ‘These days, it’s pretty hard to come out of the Fat Duck for less than £1,000 for two.’
Mr Harden said some UK restaurants were now charging ‘staggering amounts that would have been inconceivable in the UK only a few years ago’.
It comes as food inflation hit a record 11.6 per cent in October, according to new figures from the British Retail Consortium (BRC)-Nielsen Shop Price Index, up on last month’s 10.6 per cent rise and the three-month average rate of 9.7 per cent.
Figures show how supermarket food prices have soared from October last year to October this year. Basics such as tea bags, milk and sugar were some of the most significant cost rises.
The price of fresh food has also been one of the major drivers of food inflation, being 13.3 per cent more expensive than last October – up from 12.1 per cent in September.
Mr Harden added that Brexit was posing an existential threat to the restaurant business, partly because of rising food prices, but mainly because of the extra cost of hiring staff.
He said: ‘Brexit has been absolutely disastrous for the trade. We launched our guide 32 years ago before the Maastricht treaty. The ability to recruit Europeans, was one of the key drivers of the restaurant revolution that took place in the UK over the last 25 years or so. [At] many of the top restaurants … 80 per cent plus of their staff would have been European.
‘Britain has woken up to good quality food. Now the question is, how many of us can afford it, and is there anyone to serve it?’
Mr Harden said the impact of Brexit has been ‘most dramatic at top restaurants’ with many opting to charge diners for pre-paid fixed prices.
He explained: ‘The tasting menu has become much more prevalent, to help restaurants work out their margins. The answer for many is just to feed fewer people and to open less.’
Costs are not just rising in the top tier either, as traditional British fish and chip shops now warn they are facing an ‘extinction event’.
The combination of a surge in bills and an increase in prices of raw ingredients such as fish, potatoes and oil has resulted in a perfect storm with businesses left in the financial mire.
Even the boss of Argentinian steakhouse chain Gaucho warned the restaurants would be charging £100 for a steak if they passed their increasing energy costs to diners.
The popular chain says it would have to face trebling its prices in order to maintain its current margins.
Businesses that were previously profitable are now facing ‘crippling’ losses with energy prices having at least doubled for most following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The conflict has pushed up European gas prices by nearly 400 per cent in the last six months, sending electricity costs soaring.
More than a third of the UK’s pubs, restaurants and hotels are expecting to be operating at a loss or be out of business by 2023 due to the spiralling energy and food costs.
A survey of more than 500 businesses in the hospitality sector found that the vast majority are facing higher energy and food costs, which has sent confidence in the future survival of their firm plummeting.
Many pubs and restaurants across the UK are facing closure as a result of the rising costs and some have already been forced to close their doors.
London:
Araki £380
Kitchen Table £330
Endo at Rotunda £285
Roketsu £285
Story £272
Maru £242
Ledbury £236
Ikoyi £231
Core £226
Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester £224
Sketch (Lecture Room) £223
Da Terra £223
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay £210
The Frog £208
Clove Club £206
UK:
Ynyshir Hall, Eglwys Fach £410
Fat Duck, Bray £353
Midsummer House, Cambridge £321
L’Enclume, Cartmel £296
Raby Hunt, Summerhouse £277
Moor Hall, Aughton £273
Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, Great Milton £269
Waterside Inn, Bray £226
Whatley Manor, Easton Grey £217
Outlaw’s New Road, Port Isaac £215
Mana, Manchester £203
Lympstone Manor, Lympstone £201
