Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's holds last service as restaurant closes its doors for good
During the 12 years in operation the restaurant served one million customers, turned over £80m and made £17.5m in pre-tax profits, but in February Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH) announced it would close the restaurant due to being unable to renew its contract with Claridge's owner The Maybourne Group for more than a year at a time.
At the time, a spokesperson for GRH said the company felt the time was 'right to move onto new opportunities and investments' with the David Beckham-backed Union Street Cafe, which opens in September, its main focus this year.
Some of the restaurant's 90 members of full and part-time staff will be integrated into the rest of GRH, which includes Maze, Petrus and Bread Street Kitchen, but a spokesperson said not all staff had been guaranteed jobs elsewhere within the group.
On Friday the restaurant sent out its last Tweet thanking customers for their support:
To mark its closure, GRH released a series of statistics about Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's, which counted Mark Sargeant as head chef for eight years before handing over to Steve Allen in 2009.
Gordon Ramsay at Claridges facts:
- The restaurant’s most popular starter was the Lobster Ravioli. Chefs prepared 198,000 portions of the dish in total.
- Beef Wellington was the most popular main course with waiters cutting 300,000 portions at the table.
- Almost three million petit fours were eaten by customers in the 12 years of operation.
- The most expensive bill was £48k and the most expensive bottle of wine ordered as a £10k bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1900.
- Customers cited their most common reasons for visiting the restaurant as celebrating a birthday or anniversary.
Claridge's, which last summer hosted a Noma pop-up to great acclaim before being the subject of TV show Inside Claridge's, is yet to announce a replacement for the space occupied by Ramsay's restaurant.
