Video: Angela Hartnett talks to Caterer about her new London restaurant openings
Angela Hartnett talks to Caterer about the latest openings, bikes, delis and female chefs. Joanna Wood reports
Watch Caterersearch.com's video interview with Angela Hartnett here.
Angela Hartnett is the guinea pig in the Ramsay stable. She was the first, and for many years, the only, female chef to have charge of one of Gordon Ramsay's kitchens - the first female chef-patron at what was once a bastion of male clubbiness, the Connaught, in London. Now she's set to open the first boutique hotel for Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH).
The 10-bedroom York & Albany is a Grade II-listed Regency building by John Nash. English fashion and interior designer Russell Sage has kept the period look, with a few modern touches.
"When you've got a wonderful old building you don't want to put some stark, modernist design in it," asserts Hartnett.
Before she even gets to fling open the doors of York & Albany, however, on the edge of Regent's Park near Camden, London - due to start trading on 22 September - Hartnett is launching another London restaurant, Murano, in Mayfair, on 21 August.
Located in the heart of Mayfair, on the site of the former Zen Central, it takes its name from the famous Venetian glass, itself named after the island of Murano, just off Venice. Hence, there are elaborate chandeliers, part of a look put together by Richmond International. The design firm is fresh off Ramsay's new Trianon Palace hotel, in Versailles.
In some ways, this is also a first. The first fine-dining restaurant that GRH has opened outside a hotel environment in the UK since launching the flagship of the group, Gordon Ramsay, in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, in the late 1990s.
