Ramsay's toilet nightmares

Not content with giving the food at Gordon Ramsay’s first New York restaurant a roasting, the city’s top critic has now had a go at his toilets.

Not content with giving the food at Gordon Ramsay’s first New York restaurant a roasting, the city’s top critic has now had a go at his toilets.

The New York Times’ legendary Frank Bruni, who yesterday complained that the fancy eaterie was not exciting enough, said fiddly locks meant he had twice barged in on other diners availing themselves of the facilities.

Although the problem seemed to have been fixed since his first visit to Gordon Ramsay at the London he still had to take extra care fastening the doors on later trips and companions said it caused them “stress and confusion”.

“Those swinging doors have to be positioned so precisely vis-á-vis the locking mechanism, and that mechanism has to be finessed with such delicacy that some diners don’t succeed in locking their restroom doors,” Bruni wrote on his blog.

“How do I know this?

"Because on my very first visit to the Ramsay restaurants in the London NYC Hotel, during my very first attempt to use a restroom, I twice in a row pushed on the door of a restroom that hadn’t been successfully locked, felt it give, began to take a step inside and…encountered another diner!”

The fearsome critic, whose reviews are said to be able to make or break a restaurant, also moaned about the “buzz kill” of people taking flash photographs at the celebrity chef’s restaurant.

It was “especially disturbing”, he said, given the subdued atmosphere of the dining room.

Bruni gave the Scot’s American debut just two stars out of four in his main review and battered him for relying on luxuries like foie gras and truffles as much as his imagination.

While two stars from The New York Times means “very good”, it is the four-star review, only for those restaurants deemed “extraordinary”, that top-flight chefs like Ramsay aspire to.

Bruni liked some of the dishes but laid into a “cloying, gummy wedge of turbot” and a “bizarre” starter combining langoustine tails with nuggets of chicken wing.

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