The Taste Files, Case No. 002: Is Bacchanalia, London’s Most Expensive Restaurant, Actually Worth It?
Bacchanalia — Mount Street, Mayfair, London
Short answer, because I know that’s what you came for: yes. Bacchanalia in Mayfair is the most expensive restaurant ever built in London, there’s a flying Pegasus hanging over your head and a short rib I would happily walk back across the Atlantic for, and every single pound of it earned its keep. But the number at the bottom of the receipt is only ever half the story, so let me tell you how the night actually went.
Jenn made the call before we’d even reached our table. We were still weaving through the room, and she was doing that thing you do when every plate you pass somehow looks better than the last one, eyeing all of it, a little bit shameless about it, and somewhere between the front door and our seats she leaned over and told me this was going to be the best meal of the whole trip. We’d already had a stellar brunch that week, mind you, so it wasn’t exactly a low bar she was setting. But I’ve learned to trust Jenn on these things, and I love it when she’s right.
Dinner under a flying Pegasus
Here’s what she was reading the room against. Five Greco-Roman statues — a griffin, a Medusa, a unicorn, a pair of winged lovers, and that Pegasus — hang suspended over the dining room like they got caught mid-flight and simply decided to stay a while. They’re all Damien Hirst, the whole cast of them, and they set the tone before a single plate lands, which is that you have wandered into somebody’s very expensive daydream and you should probably act like you belong there. If you look close at the Medusa hanging up there, they worked the artist’s own girlfriend’s tattoos into her, which is the kind of detail you’d never catch unless somebody told you, so now I’m telling you.
Somewhere north of seventy-five million pounds went into the interior alone. Three hundred books of gold leaf. A ceiling mural that sneaks a few iPhones into an otherwise perfectly Roman feast if you sit and stare long enough. You don’t so much sit down to dinner in a place like this as get quietly let in on a secret, and honestly, that feeling starts the moment you clear the door. The staff are warm about it, and you already know from the first step inside that it’s going to be plush.
The one catch: mind the kitchen’s clock
Now, it wasn’t all seamless, and I’d be doing you a disservice to pretend that it was. We had a late reservation, and almost as soon as we’d settled in we got the news that the kitchen was about to close, and then we got that same news again, and then once more for good measure, until it was very clear this was a hard stop and we had better get our whole order in before the window shut. There was a trainee in the mix too, finding their feet right in the thick of the rush, which made those first few minutes feel busier than a seven-hundred-pound dinner really ought to.
But here’s the thing, they found their rhythm. By the time the food started coming the whole wobble had melted into the background, and the only thing I remember minding was that we’d cut it so close. So take the lesson from me and save yourself the scramble: book early here, and when they tell you it’s the last seating, go ahead and believe them.
What we ate at Bacchanalia
And oh, the food. The sleeper of the entire table was the baked feta, which came out with a caramelized top so good it made all of us go quiet for a second, salty and rich and gone long before anybody had the decency to offer to share it. The beef tartare (£42, confit egg yolk, Florina pepper sauce, a little kick of ‘nduja) was lovely in its own right, but I’ll be honest with you, it never really stood a chance, because there was warm cheese on the table, and you already know where my attention goes the minute there’s warm cheese on the table. We rounded out the starters with the Shrimps Saganaki (£27), the prawns swimming in a bubbling tomato-ouzo sauce, and they held their own even in that company.
The real star, though, the one I am genuinely still thinking about, was the braised short rib (£70, pomegranate molasses, fregola and peas). Fork-tender doesn’t quite do it justice; the thing gave way like it had been waiting all day just to be eaten, and I will tell you plainly that I did not let a single bite of it go to waste, because my mama didn’t raise the kind of woman who leaves short rib like that sitting on a plate. For the table we passed around the big lobster paccheri (£48, black truffle, creamy bisque), which was every bit as decadent as it sounds, tomatoey and rich and running clean through with truffle, and the tagliatelle truffle (£44, mushroom butter, black truffle) came out silky and fresh and deep. By the end of it our table looked like a group of people who had come to mean business. We had.
The most beautiful bathroom I’ve ever set foot in
I have to stop and tell you about the bathroom, because I have been in a lot of pretty restrooms in my time and this one is honestly in a category all its own. Over four hundred thousand tiles, mosaic from the floor straight up to the ceiling, the sinks and the walls and the stalls, the whole thing themed like some mythological garden you stumbled into by accident. It isn’t really a bathroom so much as a room they built to be photographed, and reader, I photographed it. And here’s the detail that made me laugh: the ladies’ room is that lush mythological garden, all vines and soft light, while the men’s room across the way is done in black marble and themed after Hades and the underworld. Paradise for her, the underworld for him. Somebody had a very good time designing that.
The bar menu reads like a magazine
I could honestly write a whole separate post about the bar, and I just might. The cocktail list comes bound like a glossy magazine, the kind of thing that’s as much a pleasure to hold as it is to read, heavy and beautiful in your hands, and the drinks are all color-themed, a whole spectrum of them dressed up to match the opulence around you — I went with the Bronze, because of course I did — each one given its own little personality, fruity and intense here, robust and nutty there, so you know exactly what you’re walking into before you order. The mocktails get that very same loving treatment, which I always read as the mark of a place that actually cares, because a restaurant that phones in the no-alcohol options is telling on itself. And running underneath all of it is a wine list of something like six hundred and fifty bottles from Greece and Italy and France, which is less a menu than a small library. The bar itself was dreamed up by Martin Brudnizki, the designer behind Annabel’s, all marble and mosaic and myth, atmospheric in the daytime and downright seductive once the sun goes down — which, with our late reservation in that packed, humming room, is exactly the version of it we got. The sips had me before I’d even taken the first sip.
Is Bacchanalia worth it?
So here’s the part you’ve been waiting for. Four of us, right around seven hundred and twenty-five pounds all in. Is that a lot of money? Of course it is, I’m not going to sit here and tell you otherwise. But I have handed over more than that for a whole lot less, in rooms half as beautiful, for food I’d forgotten by the next morning, and I have not forgotten one bite of this meal. For what it was, under those flying statues, with that short rib in front of me, it felt fair. And fair is not a word I get to use very often about Mayfair.
The Case File
Rated in Plates out of 5.
| Category | Plates |
|---|---|
| The Welcome | 5  |
| The Vibe | 5 |
| The Menu | 4.8 |
| The Main Event | 5 |
| The Sips | 5 |
| The Service | 4.5 |
| The Content Check | 5 |
| The Occasion Test | 5 |
| The Receipt | 4.5 |
Deal-Breaker Checklist: Clean bathroom 
(the understatement of the year) · Food at the right temperature · Quoted wait matched the real wait · No sneaky fees on the check
Chef’s Kiss : The magazine-bound bar menu. A whole dinner spent under five suspended Damien Hirst statues. The private back room built for a party. (+0.1 each.)
Final Score: 5.0
The Verdict: Going Back for Seconds.
So there’s the case, closed and stamped. If you find yourself in London with something worth celebrating, go — walk in slow so you catch the Pegasus, book early so you’re not racing the kitchen, and give yourself a good ten extra minutes for that bathroom.
Now I want to hear from you. What’s the most beautiful restaurant you have ever set foot in, the kind of room you’re still describing to people months later??? Tell me down in the comments, because I’m always building the next case.
And if you want these files before anybody else does — the stays, the eats, the trips I probably shouldn’t take but take anyway — the newsletter is where they land first, twice a week. The footage of this room, the statues, that unreal bathroom, is going up on the YouTube channel too, so come watch me eat my dinner under a flying horse.
Work hard. Play harder.
— Cori
