Maze by Gordon Ramsay, London

Maze is a very modern fine dining restaurant, in everything from the ambience and dress code right through to the food. The menu is a ‘tapas’ style tasting menu with individual dishes costing between £8 – £15 each. The chef recommended selecting 2 or 3 starter dishes and 2 main courses. I chose 3 starters and 4 main courses, being a tasting menu I wanted to taste as much as possible!

My 8 Dishes…

• Pumpkin latte with roasted duck & black truffle. Mushroom brioche on the side.
• Smoked eel, fois gois and baked potato foam and dill.
• Roasted scallops with textured pear, apple & bacon.
• Roasted hake wrapped in Parma ham, chorizo and pimento puree with squid ink.
• Halibut with black pudding, celeriac and sauce diable, with curly kale.
• Roasted squab, spiced pumpkin butter, chestnuts, brussell leaves & Madeira sauce.
• Pork belly, pigs head & parsnips.
• Sweetcorn vanilla panna cotta, salted and sweet popcorn, popcorn sherbet.

Every single dish was stunning. Standouts were the scallops, both fish main courses – particularly the halibut with black pudding and my favourite dish of the evening and one of my favourites of all time, the smoked eel & fois gois. I’d never eaten eel before but I loved it and can’t wait to have it again.

Finally, some thoughts on the restaurant. Although I enjoyed the food as much as any of the other top restaurants I have visited, I felt that their attempts to be ‘informal’ actually reduced the overall experience somewhat.

I still had a fantastic time and an average restaurant wouldn’t even come close to it. But after the high standards of Claridges and the 3 Michelin starred Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, Maze didn’t quite live up to them in terms of level of service and attention received from staff.

Date of visit: 29/11/2008