Recently in Pierre Gagnaire Category

Gordon Ramsay was in the headlines again today and unsurprisingly it was bad news again for the chef.

For last night saw the announcement of the San Pellegrino 50 Best Restaurants Awards and Gordon Ramsay's three-Michelin-starred flagship restaurant on London's Royal Hospital Road wasn't on the list. In fact, despite being in 13th place last year, it didn't even make it into the Top 100.

The consensus among the 800-strong judging panel of food writers, restaurant critics and chefs was apparently that Ramsay is "spreading himself too thin" to be included.

The national media has unsurprisingly jumped at Ramsay's exclusion (especially given that erstwhile protégé and former best mate Marcus Wareing made a dramatic entry at 52 winning the Breakthrough Award) and I can't help but wonder whether he hasn't been used to grab the necessary column inches to promote the awards. 

Comprising a starter of apple and lemon flavoured jelly balls, with a creamy texture on the inside and crackling on the outside, Gagnaire has worked for months with food scientist Hervé This to create the recipe from chemical compounds.

Entitled "le note à note", the dish, which will debut at his Michelin-starred restaurant Pierre at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong today, is a combination of "ascorbic acid, glucose, citric acid and a few grams of 4-O-a-glucopyranosyl-D-sorbitol, a sugar substitute otherwise known as maltitol". 

Hervé This, widely considered the godfather of molecular gastronomy, hailed the dish as a step into the future of haute cuisine.

"Tomorrow's chefs will frown upon plain vegetables, such as carrots and will instead use the molecules which make up carrots - caroteniods, pectins, fructose and glucuronic acid," he told The Times.

So is this the future of fine dining? 

Picture of Pierre Gagnaire supplied by Rex Features.