London chefs and restaurateurs led the list of winners at the 2023 AA Hospitality Awards last night. The event, held at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane and presented by Claudia Winkleman, saw chef Angela Hartnett win the Outstanding Contribution Award, St James’ Indian Chutney Mary awarded Restaurant of the Year and Tom Aikens’s Belgravia dining room Muse elevated to five rosette status.
Kent-born Hartnett, who cites her Italian grandmother as her culinary inspiration, got her big break working for Gordon Ramsay at Aubergine in the Nineties and came to fame as the calm-headed voice of reason on Ramsay’s 2004 TV show Hell’s Kitchen. Hartnett’s visibility is often claimed as a career inspiration to other female chefs. “In hospitality we can change lives and we do change lives,” Hartnett said upon collecting her award. “We have a responsibility to look after our teams, to make sure they have the best careers they possibly can and inspire people to be in our business.”
Hartnett’s restaurant Murano recently reopened following a refurbishment to celebrate its 15th anniversary. In addition to her Mayfair flagship, Hartnett is chef-patron of three branches of the more casual Café Murano in St James’s, Covent Garden and Bermondsey, and presents the Dish podcast with DJ Nick Grimshaw.
This year marks 115 years of the AA’s star system for hotels. Rosettes, recognising excellence in UK restaurants, were originally awarded in 1956 as the first nationwide scheme for assessing the quality of food served by restaurants and hotels.
Aikens’s Muse joins the three-Michelin-starred likes of Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, Sketch Lecture Room and Library and Core by Clare Smyth in receiving five rosettes. “Each year becomes more tough to stand out in the hospitality industry, therefore it is super special being part of a select group of restaurants in the UK with five AA rosettes,” Aikens said. The AA defines five rosettes as “the pinnacle, where cooking compares with the best in the world.”
London Restaurant of the Year winner Chutney Mary was opened by sisters Camellia and Namita Panjabi and Namita’s husband Ranjit in Chelsea in 1990 and moved to its current premises in St James’s in 2015. The restaurant is widely credited with persuading Londoners that Indian cooking could command the same price as western European cuisines, by introducing techniques such as making sauces from scratch and grinding spices to order.
Other London winners included three rosettes for London Stock, Behind and The Lanesborough Grill. The Lanesborough also took home the award for London Hotel of the Year while the Pan Pacific London hotel won the AA Accessible Award. The AA Chefs’ Chef of the Year was won by Paul Ainsworth of No6 in Padstow, Cornwall.
For a full list of winners, click here.
