Wine & Dine

Although there was necessarily a hotel restaurant from the inception of the Ritz, the current hotel restaurant, L'Espadon (The Swordfish) was established in 1956 by Charles Ritz.[49] He was a keen fishing enthusiast so named the restaurant after a fish.[50] The restaurant is inspired by the legendary first chef of the hotel, Auguste Escoffier, serving "traditional French culinary style with contemporary overtones".[50] The cuisine was by the award-winning chef Michel Roth, the ninth head chef of the hotel; the restaurant was awarded a second star by the 2009 edition of the influential Michelin Red Guide.[15][51] He was the executive chef of the restaurant until its closing on 1 August 2012 for a complete renovation. The head chef was formerly Guy Legay, cited as one of Paris's greatest chefs,[52] who had served from at least 1986 to beyond 1999.[53][54] In 1999, Esquire magazine wrote, "the dining room, L'Espadon, down the long corridor of mirrors and display cases, has a glittering Regency formality that seems to swirl around you, and it's easy enough to imagine Hemingway sitting down with Dietrich to a dish of chef Guy Legay's buttery scrambled eggs..."[54] The restaurant decor is described as "opulent with trompe l’oeil ceilings, swagged drapes, and views into the garden."[35] The courtyard garden is rich in greenery and contains several statues and a fountain.[35] The hotel hires five or so florists to provide fresh flowers.

A 24-seat counter bar restaurant in Neal’s Yard, from the people behind The Palomar.

So you thought you loved the Palomar. You thought you’d be faithful and true. But that was before you met little sis the Barbary. It’ll make you want to quit your job, pack your bags, and run away into the sunset together

The Barbary, you see, takes everything that’s good about the Palomar but ditches the bits that don’t quite work (like the fact that the ‘fun seats’ up at the counter are also the most cramped; or the fact that the raw bar is the weakest link on the otherwise stellar 'modern day Jerusalem' menu).

At The Barbary, all the stools are arranged at 24-seat horseshoe shaped counter bar. Down one wall, there’s a standing counter, where they’ll feed you moreish bar snacks (like deep-fried pastry ‘cigars’ filled with cod, lemon & Moroccan spices) while you wait for a seat. And if the queue spills outside, you’ll find yourself in pedestrian-only, full-of-character Neal’s Yard. As places to loiter go, it’s not too shabby.

Oh but the food, the food. Where the Palomar is intentionally progressive, looking to push the boundaries of 'Jerusalem' food, the Barbary looks to the past. The team, led by Tel Aviv-born chef Eyal Jagermann (ex-Palomar), have scoured the wider region, travelling down the eponymous Barbary coast (the stretch of north Africa from modern-day Morocco to modern-day Egypt) to revive the dishes that have informed their own culinary heritage. The signature ‘naan e beber’, for instance, is made to an ancient recipe for leavened bread, with just four ingredients (flour, sugar, salt and yeast). The flattened, kneaded dough is slammed into a fiercely hot tandoor for just a minute or two, quickly re-emerging all fluffy and blistered. When you can get this excited about bread, you know great things are about to happen.

Great things like the octopus. Slow-braised with oranges and bay leaves in its own juices, the chefs wait until it’s soft enough to fall apart before slinging it on the coal-fired robata. Silky on the inside, charred on the outside, I’m declaring these the best tentacles in town. Equally tender and smoky was the chicken ‘msachen’, a dish you get at Israeli parties. At The Barbary, the skin-on thigh meat is marinaded in a yoghurt, sumac and baharrat (a Syrian/Egyptian spice mix) for a full 24 hours before cooking. It’s a bit of a theme: everything here is made from scratch and with care. For dessert, order the knafeh – a sandwich of finely-shredded filo pastry filled with white mozzarella and goats’ cheese. Pan-fried until it’s crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, it’s then sprinkled with roasted pistachio nuts. Try pressing it gently with a fork and watch it ooze puddles of clarified butter. This is not food for the uptight, but for people who live life to the full. On my midweek visit, every seat was taken by 6.15pm, the atmosphere was electric, the air filled with charcoal smoke, music and laughter. The Barbary: a place to fall joyously, head over heels, lightning-bolts-R-us in love with.

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Time Out says
Friendly warning! We're working hard to be accurate. But these are unusual times, so please check that venues remain open.
The sheer glamour factor would be enough to recommend this restaurant, Alain Ducasse's most lofty Paris undertaking. The dining room ceiling drips with 10,000 crystals. An amuse-bouche of a single langoustine in a lemon cream with a touch of Iranian caviar starts the meal off beautifully, but other dishes can be inconsistent: a part-raw/part-cooked salad of autumn fruit and veg in a red, Chinese-style sweet-and-sour dressing, or Breton lobster in an overwhelming sauce of apple, quince and spiced wine. Cheese is predictably delicious, as is the rum baba comme à Monte-Carlo.