Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester - London
The curtain of light encloses a semi-private dining room
Rating: 17/20
Where: London, UK
When: Dinner for 2 on 15 March 2025
Cost per Person: Tasting menu £250-£285, Wine Pairing £100-£500
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars
Why: French cuisine with dishes that prepare a single ingredient multiple ways
World-renowned chef Alain Ducasse currently has two three-Michelin-starred restaurants to his name: one in Monaco, and the other in London's swanky Dorchester hotel. Our only previous visit to his London outpost had been in 2015. Back then, in late November, the lobby had already been decorated for the upcoming holidays, and countless Christmas trees lined the atrium leading to the restaurant. When we wondered aloud how one kept dozens of trees fresh throughout the month-long season, we were informed that they were simply thrown out and replaced every three days. Wow.
Alain Ducasse's restaurant is still located off that long atrium, and it's quite easy to miss it, since its door has only minimal signage. If you know, you know, apparently. The dining room, decorated mostly with wood and shades of gray has windows overlooking Park Lane and Hyde Park beyond it. It is what you'd expect a classic French dining room to look like, and most of the male diners were wearing jackets. A place where one might bring one's parents - as we did ten years ago when my mother remarked that this was the best meal she ever had at a Michelin-starred restaurant. How would tonight's dinner compare?
The restaurant offers both a tasting menu (consisting of either five or seven courses) as well as a three-course “prix fixe” a la carte menu. The tasting menu, with its smaller courses, contained almost all the dishes that were available via the a la carte menu, except for the desserts. For that reason, we ordered the seven course tasting menu, but asked for two different desserts for the two of us, which was no problem. There were three wine pairings to choose from, costing £145, £245 and £500 for the seven course menu (and slightly less for the five course one). I tried the £145 pairing, which had good, but not outstanding wines. A safe choice.
Our dinner started with no fewer than five appetizers, all served simultaneously on separate plates, almost filling our little table. First, we had a gougère filled with aged Comté cheese and a sauce similar to a Béchamel sauce. This bite was served slightly warmer than room temperature, but only by a smidgen, and had a soft crunch. Nice enough, but I've had better and more cheesy gougères 16. A champignon mushroom tartlet had a very fresh mushroom taste, quite different from the more earthy, umami flavors usually associated with mushrooms. Quite nice together with the many-layered filo dough underneath 17. A multi-seed cracker was topped with radishes and red mullet bottarga. Or at least so we were told, in practice this bite tasted merely of seeds, one couldn't really make out the toppings 15.
A poached oyster tartare with an oyster leaf in a buckwheat tuile was served on the half-shell, and looked like a tiny taco. The taco “shell” was a bit soft, and the insides had some acidity, but unfortunately very little taste of oyster 14. Finally, some white asparagus on a fork was meant to be dipped into a bowl filled with an egg sauce and blood oranges. The white asparagus was light on flavor (as is its wont), but the bitter orange was quite pronounced and went well with the creamy egg sauce that had been made from boiled eggs 14.
Four different breads were served with a fleur de sel salt from Provence, British butter and a soy curd flavored with pepper and olive oil. The latter was definitely an unusual accompaniment for bread. It had a fluffy texture and tasted mostly of olive oil, and lightly of cheese. Interesting, but we actually preferred the butter with a bit of salt. The breads themselves were fine, but not mind-blowing. A Scottish bread with a bit of lardo was essentially a very soft white bread. A ciabatta and a lightly crunchy sourdough bread were pretty generic examples of their ilk. More distinctive was a rye bread that had a very crunchy crust and a good flavor. For the rye, 16, but on average 14.
Our first course contained a blood orange jam and monk's beard, but was really about a single ingredient: sunchokes. A sunchoke broth contained a big piece of cooked sunchoke, a sunchoke condiment and slices of almost raw sunchokes. It's always impressive to see an entire dish made from (essentially) only one ingredient. The sunchokes had different textures, from raw to cooked, and they were light and not potatoey or starchy at all - quite an accomplishment for a sunchoke dish. There was some freshness from the herbs, but overall, the taste was dominated by the broth, which was quite acidic and lightly sweet. Not bad, but it was unfortunate that after all this focussing on sunchokes, their taste was hidden by the seasonings of the broth, and having the dish become a bit single note flavorwise 15.
A hand-dived scallop was served with a lemon beurre blanc that contained finger limes, nori and Kristal caviar. Unusually, there was some Greek yogurt hidden under the scallop. The yogurt was a brilliant and creative addition to the dish - it made the sauce seem thicker without making the dish too heavy. The scallop was nicely cooked: buttery, tender, but not too soft. The sauce was wonderful as well, buttery and with some strong acidity. We were told that there was no salt in this dish except for what was in the caviar - something we wouldn't have guessed, since the dish definitely wasn't undersalted 18.
The focus of the next dish was lobster. In fact, it featured three different cuts of lobster as well as a lobster sauce. But there were also plenty of other ingredients on the plate: fried veal sweetbreads, grilled mushrooms, semolina pasta, chicken, a truffle quenelle and mascarpone. I'm not sure what inspired this wide range of ingredients: something for everyone, maybe? If so, my pick would have been the pasta together with the sauce(s) - simply amazing! Very flavorful, cooked perfectly al dente, they would have rated a 19. The rest of the dish was more of mixed bag. Some of the lobster parts were better than others, one in particular was unfortunately chewy. The mushrooms were fine although not special, the sweetbreads very crispy (but still not one of my favorite ingredients), the quenelles didn't taste of much at all. Altogether, more ok than great 17.
A filet of Dover sole was served with watercress, ground roasted hazelnuts, a watercress pesto, and a sauce made of potatoes, sole broth and watercress oil. On the side was a salt-crust-baked, coarsely mashed potato that was mixed with watercress butter. Given its four mentions in this description, it's no secret that watercress was the silent star of this dish, adding herbal notes to fish and potatoes alike. The fish was on the well-done side, and went well with the flavorful herbal sauce, the herbs and the nutty hazelnuts. This was one of those dishes were all components were best eaten together, since the hazelnuts were oddly nutty and sweet for a savory, herbal dish, but that issue disappeared when everything was mixed. Equally good or even better were the mashed potatoes - a quite different take on the subject from the Robuchon version. The light herbal flavor, some crunch and acidity from the marinated red onions - quite excellent. Only the last few bites of potato felt a bit dry, maybe a consequence of not having saturated the dish with butter 17.
The final savory dish was a filet of 30-day-aged British beef. Next to it were a small caramelized sardine filet, red onions, a puntarelle mash, and variations of radicchio: raw, roasted with bone marrow, and as a foam in a separate bowl. The beef itself was flavorful, enhanced by the black pepper on top, but its consistency was a bit chewy - more tender would have been better. The sardine was nicely fishy, but it was pretty small, so didn't affect the overall taste much. The stewed side dish was full of flavor, the foam light and almost chocolaty and the raw radicchio quite bitter. Again, it was nice to see a single ingredient play so many different roles in the same dish 17. The pescatarian version of this course replaced the beef with a filet of John Dory. The sauce, made from the fish and some vegetables, was lovely and the fish was firm and meaty in texture, maybe a bit overcooked. Still, I'd give this the nod over the beef 17.
The cheese course is often the highlight at a French restaurant, but in this case, there was no actual cheese cart and we simply received a plate with three different cheeses: a 40-month-aged Comté, a Brie de Meaux and a Roquefort. On the side were a green salad and a little baguette. These were all “safe” choices for cheese - some variety, well-known types of cheese and nothing particularly challenging. The dessert equivalent of this might be a vanilla ice cream - reliably tasty, but not the most exciting thing in the world. The Comté was quite hard, the brie chewy and thick, the blue cheese very soft and almost liquid. The herbal salad was a bit spicy, with a light sauce. The crunchy bread was slightly warm and of neutral taste 16.
Next we received a palate cleanser: a lime-pineapple sorbet next to various forms of pineapple (plain, as a condiment, and pickled). The sorbet was sweet, but its sides were very sour, in fact too much so for my taste 16.
Then it was time for the dessert, and as I mentioned above, we had asked for two different ones. The “standard” dessert of the tasting menu was a citrus-bergamot sorbet that was served with several different kinds of citrus, crunchy kombu seaweed, olive oil and lemon juice. The sorbet was sweet, the kombu nicely crunchy, and the citrus fruit had a huge flavor range, from sweet to acidic to bitter. A very good, flavorful and light dessert 19. As our second dessert, we picked the classic Ducasse rum baba served with a vanilla Chantilly cream and, well, rum. We got to choose the latter among four different options ranging from dry to sweet. I went for the sweetest option, hailing from Venezuela. The dish was served at room temperature, or maybe slightly below it. The cream was light, but the strong rum flavor more than made up for that. Very good, and actually better than the version I had at Mr Ducasse's three-star restaurant in Monaco in 2019 18.
A quick tour of the kitchen allowed us to exchange a few words with the chef and snag a freshly baked madeleine 16. Back at the table, we got to enjoy a final round of petit fours. A chocolate buckwheat caramel “taco” tasted a bit stale, in terms of its shell and the not-very-crunchy buckwheat 12. An herbal bite made of sage, finger limes and nasturtium was very sour; even the herbs had a sour flavor 13. An apple “tarte tatin” was made from filo dough and lemon and had a lightly crunchy apple on top 13. Better were three chocolates from the Alain Ducasse chocolate manufactory in Paris. First, a Madagascan chocolate ganache flavored with lime had a nicely judged level of lime flavor - strong, but not too strong 17. A Peruvian chocolate ganache had an interesting aftertaste that was hard to put in words - quite good though 16. Finally, a coconut praline had a mealy texture inside and a lovely roasted coconut flavor - my favorite among the three 17.
Overall: Elegant French cuisine in a classy, but comfortable environment with great service. I liked that several dishes focused on a single ingredient and incorporated them in many different preparations. Even when the result didn't wow me, at least it was easy to see what the intention had been, making the meal more distinctive among an abundance of of French restaurants. Unfortunately, most dishes were in the “good, but not amazing” category. A safe place to take the family, maybe, but not necessarily the place to totally blow them away 17.
