Chef Marcus Wareing unveils new look at the Berkeley

‘Stuffy formality is out, I want a dinner party atmosphere’, says top chef Marcus Wareing

One of London’s top chefs says he wants to introduce a “dinner party atmosphere” to his two-Michelin-star Knightsbridge restaurant because his customers no longer desire hushed formal dining.

Marcus Wareing has ordered a £1.4 million makeover of his “dated” eponymous flagship at the Berkeley Hotel — one of only 11 holders of multiple Michelin stars in the capital — to make it less fussy and intimidating.

Waiters and sommeliers will be told to be “more American and less French” in how they deal with diners, there will be less emphasis on theatrical tasting menus, and acres of heavy starched linen will “go on the bonfire”.

The 43-year-old chef, who made his name working with Gordon Ramsay at Petrus, told the Standard: “My number one priority is ending the stuffiness. People want to come to relax and not sit there while the waiter talks you through the 10 different ingredients in the dish.

“If someone comes in and says, ‘I want three courses and a glass of Chardonnay and I want it in half an hour’, we’re not going to stick our noses in the air and say, ‘Humph why isn’t he having the tasting menu’, we’re going to deliver it.

“I want people to have that feeling you get when you’ve been to a really good dinner party and you come away thinking, ‘Wow, that was an amazing evening’. That’s what we want to reproduce.”

Staff will be retrained by restaurant manager Daniel Greenock, who has spent a year working at New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park, which has three Michelin stars.

Wareing said he had also been influenced by observing shifts in diners’ behaviour since the banking crisis in 2008.

The economic slump had irrevocably changed the way people eat out and he had decided to start making the changes in 2012, which was “the hardest year for keeping people interested in fine dining”.

Fewer are ordering the £115-a-head dinner tasting menu — once compulsory for parties of more than six, people are eating earlier and the average spend has fallen by about 10 per cent.

The Berkeley’s burgundy interiors designed by the late David Collins in the early Noughties will be ripped out during a two-and-a-half-month closure and replaced with a lighter, more spacious dining room with marble and wood interiors and a new art collection.

The linen “drop cloths” currently draped on tables will be scrapped so that “the beautiful table legs are there to be looked at” with just a simple table cloth on top.

The name is also being changed from Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley to the less formal café-style MARCUS, although the menu will not be touched.

The restaurant will close on January 18 and reopen on March 27.

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