When I visited: October 2015

Location: London, near St Paul’s

Team: Gordon Ramsay (group founder), Erion Karaj (Executive Head Chef), Paul Shearing (Head Chef), Mat Horvath (General Manager)

Rating in the Michelin Guide: Recommended

Dining Owl Hoot rating: 3/5

What to wear: Men – jeans or nice trousers and a shirt; women – jeans and a smart top or a smart dress / workwear

Ambience: Bustling, fun

Course of the meal: Porterhouse steak

If I could change one thing: Allow the same staff to serve drinks and food

Review:

Bread Street Kitchen offers one of the biggest restaurant spaces this Owl has ever seen, but somehow still managed to fill the space on a Friday evening. The service was good from the start, although the staff asked to swap out a menu we had already been given as they said it was out of date, and slightly weirdly we could easily alert them when ready to order food but then a different waiter had to actually take the order.

My partner Owl and I went for the a la carte dinner, after starting with some good cocktails – a pink martini and an espresso martini which contained liquorice. With the food, we had a carafe of white oaked Chardonnay which was tasty and went well with all the food.

We started with crab and apple cocktail and a carpaccio with avocado and ginger; both were suitably light as we were going for steak as a main. We shared a Porterhouse cut of steak with hand-cut chips, with sides of honey-spiced carrots and a beetroot salad with feta and nuts. All these elements were full of flavour, especially the steak itself. We had to have quite a lot of steak by weight to allow us to order the Porterhouse cut but it was worth it, and you can always leave some. Desserts were a chocolate fondant with salted caramel ice cream, and a Bakewell tart with creme fraiche. They weren’t too big or sweet, which is a common failing in restaurants.

Bread Street Kitchen is well worth a visit if you are in the City area for dinner.