Chelsea carnivores

The Maze Grill is on a sinister street in Chelsea, between a small Tesco — a boutique Tesco? — and a shop selling ugly sculptures of cats. The Chelsea Physic Garden, with its poisoned plants and amazingly posh Sunday walkers, is nearby. I cannot walk in the Physic Garden without hearing the howls of property developers from the skies, longing to destroy it, because what is it for, this garden and its small carnivorous plants, these tiny, dangerous Chelsea-ites?

The Maze Grill is the fifth restaurant of that brand from Gordon Ramsay, who operates 25 restaurants globally from Las Vegas to Raqqa, alongside his more important sideline of shouting at people as they chop fish on television. I am not sure whether this means he is a bigger brand than his chief rival Marco Pierre White — because White’s website is confusing, with a section called ‘Afghanistan’, with sub-sections ‘Basra’, ‘Helmand’ and ‘Kabul’ next to photographs of White posing with, respectively, a helicopter, a Santa hat and a turkey. So I cannot say if there is a Marco’s New York Italian in Raqqa too. I hope there is.

The fourth Maze Grill is in Park Walk, Chelsea, on the site of Aubergine, from which Ramsay rose to fame, but I am not good on west London and I booked here by mistake. I am therefore in a satellite of a satellite, in the farthest reaches of the Ramsay Empire, as far from the Death Star (Gordon Ramsay Burgr and that is not a spelling mistake, they just decided the ‘e’ was unfashionable) as I can be. So there will be nothing on Ramsay’s original cave, and what it smelt like, and what it meant.

This Maze Grill is less overwrought than the usual Ramsay lair, almost humble in its countenance.