As Jonathan Prynn reports in today's Standard, according to the latest edition of Harden’s London Restaurants, there are now 54 venues in London where a couple could expect to receive a bill for at least £300 for their evening out. It's a huge increase; up by almost half from 37 last year. But it signifies a broader change, too, a great upward joly: as recently as the 2016 Harden's guide, only The Araki London in Mayfair went past the £150-a-head barrier.
Today, the idea of a meal at a top-end restaurant coming in at that price feels faintly quaint. In fact, the price of a meal for two in London’s most expensive restaurants this year crossed the £1000 threshold. It happened first during the summer as Sushi Kanesaka opened within 45 Park Lane and part of the Dorchester Collection. Here, supper costs £420-a-head before drinks and service are added. With service at 15 per cent — which, though discretionary, is added automatically by the restaurant — and a bottle of house wine at £125, a meal for two costs £1109.75. A recommended sake pairing can be had for £150 or £220, with bottles starting at £250 and rising to £1550. Tap water, however, can be ordered, as can a bottle of beer — at £10.
Sushi Kanesaka declined to comment when approached by the Standard. It is not, however, an outlier. It is not even the most expensive place to eat in London; in October, Aragawa, a Kobe beef specialist from Tokyo, opened on Clarges Street serving the UK's most expensive steak, with prices starting at £500 and rising to £900. Ahead of its opening, a representative for the restaurant confirmed to the Standard that “the price at Aragawa will be roughly £750-plus, depending on wine.” The representative was right and — given the wine list focusses on Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne from grand cru vineyards — was perhaps conservative; it is easy to imagine diners might easily pay £1,000 per head. While Kanesake and Aragawa are outliers of sorts, London is far from short of places where serious money can be spent on a lunch or supper. Taku, on Albemarle Street in Mayfair, offers is signature omakase menu for £300-a-head with a £220 drinks pairing — £1040 for two before service — which can be upgraded to a “prestige” offering for an additional £100 per person for both food and drink, adding a total of £200 per person to the bill. A cheaper 17-course lunch menu is also offered for £160. The Araki, in Mayfair, offers a £310-per-head menu, excluding service at 15 per cent, and any drinks.
While Japanese fine dining has traditionally always been expensive in London, it is not the only style of cooking charging as much. Celebrated French chef Claude Bosi, who runs two-Michelin-star Bibendum in Chelsea’s Michelin House, offers a Taste of the Season menu at £215; wine pairings begin at £180 but the “Selection Exceptionelle” comes in at £495. Similarly, three-Michelin-starred Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, which offers top-tier, traditional French fare, offers its Taste of Summer menu for £215, excluding any supplements, which add a total of £257-per-person to the bill. There is a Champagne pairing offered at £640 for each diner. Darroze declined to comment when approached by the Standard.
London is not alone, however. A meal at the remote Ynyshir on the west coast of Wales, recently voted the UK’s number one restaurant at the National Restaurant Awards, costs £375, excluding drinks, with accommodation on site starting at £290. A meal and accommodation can be had for £520-per-head.
Not all fine-dining bills are heading skywards, however. In September, Hackney chef’s table The Sea, The Sea announced the price of its eight-course tasting menu would reduce from from £150 to £95. It follows price cuts by two-Michelin-starred Kitchen Table, which reduced the cost of its 20-course tasting menu by a third to £200 in May, and one-Michelin-star Pollen Street, which in April reduced the price of its tasting menu from £185 to £145, though this has now crept back up to £165.
The changing prices follow a challenging year for the restaurant industry, which has been hit particularly hard by rising prices across the board for food and energy, while staffing costs have also risen, owing to a recruitment crisis. In July, chef Sven-Hanson Britt — after blasting London for what he perceived as a “staid and vapid” dining scene — announced he was closing his south London tasting-menu restaurant Oxeye. Earlier in the year, the chef told industry magazine Caterer that “prices need to go up, because it doesn’t look like costs will come down anytime soon.”
"Four-figure meals are nothing new, but the rise of hyper-luxury dining feels more at odds with the mainstream than ever"
The four-figure lunch is not quite new, writes David Ellis. Famously, 22 years ago, six investment bankers spent £44,007 at Gordon Ramsay’s Pétrus (the money-men, the story goes, were then unceremoniously fired). There will always be those who want to spend for the sake of it; at the time, around the corner at restaurateur Soren Jessen’s Noble Rot Mayfair — no relation to the current operation of the same name — the same bill, Jessen remembers, “would have come in at about £8000, max.”
The rub here is that the Pétrus bill, right down to the last seven pounds, was almost exclusively spent on wine. In fact, Ramsay’s restaurant waived the food bill, which came in at a mere £400 — or about £66 a head.
It is facile, if not meaningless, to remark that times have changed. But while gauche flashing of the cash will always exist — when Turkish butcher Nusret Gökçe, better known as Salt Bae, opened his Knightsbridge restaurant in 2021, reports of a diner spending £37,000 emerged — what is notable lately is the increasing cost of food at the top end of the market. At recently-opened French restaurant Pavyllon on Park Lane, for instance, there is a king crab starter at £58; elsewhere, a riff on surf-and-turf — granted, with wagyu and blue lobster tail — is £179.
London is not on its own with steep prices; earlier this year it was reported that the price of supper at 15 New York restaurants topped $1000, while a seat at the counter of chef Masayoshi Takayama’s restaurant Masa by Central Park is presently priced at $950, before service or drinks.
What this speaks to, thinks Jessen — an industry veteran who made his name with Oliver Peyton at the celebrated Atlantic Bar & Grill, and whose upmarket restaurant One Lombard Street turns 25 this year — is the increasing divide between the capital’s diners. “We have this extraordinary difference between the high end and the low end,” he says. “We have the cost of living crisis, but all these people still spending. It’s like the roaring Twenties; there are bad things happening underneath, but at the top people are still splashing out.”
Interestingly, some of the capital’s priciest restaurants are beginning to offer deals to entice more trade. At Salt Bae’s Nusr-Et, for instance, which on opening offered a £50 cappuccino, there is now a weekday lunch deal with three courses for £39. At Richard Caring’s Bacchanalia, which is said to contain the world’s largest collection of Greek and Roman artworks, the set lunch offers two courses for £40, or three for £49; the evening Feast menu is £150.
Unfortunately, while such deals exist, a meal out looks set to only get more expensive. As the Standard's report touches upon, restaurants operate on thin profit lines: there is tax, business rates, energy costs, rent, and staff wages to consider, and just as consumers in supermarkets are paying more for their shopping, so are restaurants. We have seen the rise in alcohol duty, passed onto the consumer. It will not be cheap. Inflation may be falling, then, but restaurant bills are unlikely to.
