My dinner with Gordon Ramsey

OK - hope you didn't get too excited by the title! My friend is a big Gordon Ramsey fan and we decided to have dinner at his restaurant during our trip. Suffice to say I was a little overwhelmed to find out that he had 10 restaurants in London and his namesake restaurant was very formal (jacket & tie for men and all that). So rather randomly, I picked Boxwood Cafe as our GR restaurant of choice for this trip.

Boxwood is located in the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge - I realized that I had been there before in its previous incarnation as Vong's (I guess GR's star is rising while Jean-Georges' is declining?!) When we walked in, the nice gal up front made sure to inform us that they would need our table in 2 hours but we would be welcome to sit in the bar to finish up dessert and coffee if necessary. That was a first for me.

We picked the tasting menu (£55), so we could try all the highlights:

• Creamed sweetcorn, basil and lobster soup
• Ceviche of organic salmon and crab
• Roasted ramero pepper with avocado, feta cheese, slow roasted tomatoes and pumpkin seed oil
• Roasted loin of yellow fin tuna, parsnip puree, shallot and black pepper sauce
• Braised featherblade of Dedham Vale beef with pumpkin puree and ceps
• Valrhona hot chocolate fondue, marshmallows, biscotti and fruit kebabs

The soup was good, but not spectacular - I do have a fondness for corn soup though, and I enjoyed the little surprise of a lobster tail at the bottom of the cup. The ceviche was surprisingly tart with little segments of grapefruit scattered over the top - very good. The pepper was ok I guess - I don't like peppers or avocado, so could have skipped over this course quite happily (my husband would have loved it). The tuna was extremely good - the black pepper sauce was an unusual pairing and made the fish taste even meatier than usual. The braised beef (Dedham Vale seemed to be the UK equivalent of Niman Ranch) was fork-tender and came with very nice mushrooms (that's what ceps means) - but alas, I was so stuffed that I didn't fully enjoy it.

I asked for a dessert substitution since I couldn't quite stomach the chocolate fondue (I know that's hard to believe - you can tell I was really full!). So I had the coconut panna cotta with fresh mango coulis and a campari sorbet. That was just the light finish I needed. Of course, I still sampled my friend's chocolate fondue to make sure it was good. The best of both worlds!

The serving staff were professional and some of them seemed very intense and focused in their interactions with each other - was this a trickle down effect from their big boss?!

And no, GR was not in the house.