Few restaurant names are as evocative as Le Gavroche, the first British restaurant ever to win three Michelin stars and the training ground for a generation of chefs, including Marco Pierre White, Monica Galetti, and Gordon Ramsay, who bought the Mayfair address when the landmark closed in 2024. He has now entrusted the site to his Sydney-born protégé, Matt Abé, who became chef-patron of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay when Clare Smyth left to open Core in 2016.
Wallpaper* dines at Bonheur by Matt Abé, London
The mood: tactile minimalism
Russell Sage Studio is behind the look of Ramsay restaurants, including Pétrus and 22 Bishopsgate, but here it’s Abé who has been heavily involved in the design process. Details such as the yellow leather tabletops reflect the chef’s vision for a tactile and comfortable space that matches his culinary ethos of approachable refinement (Bonheur is the French word for ‘happiness’). Dramatic flourishes include floral installations, sculptural waiter stations and horsehair wallpaper adorning illuminated recesses in the dining room.
‘The space is intended to feel soft, stylish and emotionally resonant,’ says executive creative director Russell Sage, ‘with discreet luxury that is crisp and elegant, without being over the top. The palette includes peach, rust, sandy walnut and ochre tones, subtly referencing Matt’s Australian roots without being literal, and reflecting the overarching concept of rich, warm minimalism.’
The basement dining room is unrecognisable from the glossy black-and-red Le Gavroche days, with the best seats in the house at Petit Bonheur, the six-seat chef’s table, which offers the opportunity to get up close and personal with Abé and his team.
The food: Abé unleashed
Bonheur is very much Abé’s, not Ramsay’s restaurant, but don’t come expecting a radical departure from the fine-dining playbook. There’s a three-course à la carte menu, but two tasting menus – the five-course Journey and the seven-course Dream – are the main attraction. The cooking, however, is no re-tread of what Abé was doing at Royal Hospital Road. Here at his first solo restaurant, the chef has total creative freedom, best exemplified by his choice of ingredients.
Bonheur is the only restaurant in the country to serve Cumbrian 125-day-aged Blue Grey sirloin, developed between Abé and Lake District Farmers as an experiment into the dry-ageing process and transformed by the chef into a butter-soft slice of pink meat encased in crisply seared fat with a half-moon of potato terrine on the side: the poshest meat and potatoes imaginable.
Other classic dishes given the contemporary haute-cuisine treatment include quiche Lorraine re-imagined as a cheesy tart of leek and pork belly with vin jaune sauce, and a sweet-toothed dessert of pecan mousse with cocoa ice cream and the grown-up addition of Pedro Ximénez gel.
Bonheur by Matt Abé is located at 43 Upper Brook Street, London, W1K 7QR, UK.
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