Matt Abé spies a small crack in the wall as he ascends the stairs to the bar area at his Mayfair restaurant. No guest would spot it, but it’s Abé’s job to notice things like this. The chef and now restaurateur has spent a large chunk of his professional life working alongside Gordon Ramsay, including a decade retaining his three stars at his flagship Chelsea restaurant, and the exacting standards of his mentor have been drilled into him. Now at his own place with his name finally above the door, he’s certainly not going to let those standards slip.
In fact, within just a few months since opening, Bonheur by Matt Abé was awarded two Michelin stars, joining an elite group of fewer than 30 restaurants in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Given Abé’s track record and cooking ability the red book recognition came as a shock to absolutely no one, including Abé, although he’d never fully admit that.
“I knew Michelin were going to be looking at us, it was quite obvious given the interest in the site,” he says somewhat coyly. “I’ve seen other restaurants win accolades in a similar fashion - Brooklands by Claude Bosi got two stars within four months. If you look at my pedigree and where I’ve come from there’s a lot of moving parts to put into practice, but Michelin was not a given. It took a lot of hard work and preparation to be awarded what we have within three months. It was pretty magical.”
A fairy-tale launch
As restaurant launches go, they don’t get much more fairy-tale than Bonheur. It’s a rare chef that gets the backing and the assistance of Ramsay to open their own place and the site in which Abé has done it is equally pinch me in terms of its significance. The 43 Upper Brook Street address, in earshot of the thrum of Ferraris and Lamborghinis cruising up and down nearby Park Lane, was home to the Rouxs’ seminal restaurant Le Gavroche from 1981 to early 2024, a culinary landmark spoken about in the same breath as Pierre Koffmann’s La Tante Claire or Marco Pierre White’s Harvey’s. If walls could talk the building could do a year on the after-dinner speech circuit.
“For me the history of the site embellished and made what we were doing even stronger,” says Abé. “I never worked for the Rouxs or at Le Gavroche, it had no personal significance to me except having dined there once, but I greatly appreciate the influence the Rouxs have had on gastronomy in the UK and globally. It’s phenomenal how far the family tree spreads.”
That said, Abé was determined to write a fresh chapter for the site. “It wasn’t about upholding that legacy or it remaining the same,” he adds. “In the beginning people were asking if I was going to keep the name (Roux said at the time of the closure that he would retain the rights to the Le Gavroche name) but it meant nothing to me. It was always going to be something different. The part that I do want to carry on though is the restaurant’s legacy of nurturing talent.”
Settling in Mayfair
Given Abé’s pedigree and style of cooking, which is rooted in French technique, it seemed written in the stars - so to speak - that he would take on a site of such import. Yet that was not the original plan. The intention for his solo project was not only something a bit more casual than the style of cooking to which he had dedicated the past two decades but something not in central London at all. With the help of Ramsay’s property guy, he started looking at sites at the tail-end of 2023 with his heart set on going south of the river.
“There is only a handful of great restaurants south of the river, places such as Restaurant Story, Trivet, Trinity. It is not the epicentre of starred restaurants so I thought maybe I could be a big fish in a smaller pond,” says Abé of his initial plans. “I thought I’d go for that slightly more neighbourhood appeal approach.”
The history of the site embellished and made what we were doing even stronger
Matt Abé
The search didn’t prove fruitful, however, so Abé switched attention to areas including Marylebone and Chelsea, including close to Bibendum where Harrods had converted an old storage facility, but nothing met his requirements. “The problem with a lot of places was that the kitchen had to be in the basement and dining room above, which for me was always a no-no. Having worked for so many years at Royal Hospital Road you really do appreciate the advantages of that simplicity of movement from kitchen to dining room.”
It was only when he read that Le Gavroche’s landlord was looking for a new tenant that the idea of something very different sprouted. “I called Gordon and said to him ‘I’ve got a stupid idea’,” recalls Abé. “He said it was pretty ballsy but there was no harm in looking so the following week we did. I got here and there was no furniture and Gordon was explaining how things used to be and within that first five minutes of being in the building I had a sense that I wanted to make this my home. This really felt like the right place.”
A personal stamp
There’s little denying that Abé has made the site his own, injecting more light into the basement restaurant and bringing a modern flourish to the building throughout. Taking influences from Scandinavian style and Japanese minimalism but with references to his Australian heritage, the restaurant is full of personal touches, many of which further display Abé’s aforementioned attention to detail.
In the dining room, he opted for banquettes in places to soften the edges of the room. Spaces between the seating have not been wasted, with cavities that can be uncovered to hold wine coolers when required. Upstairs in the newly refitted bar area, Abé makes me feel the undersides of the tables which are all felt lined to ensure women don’t accidentally snag their tights. “These are all the tiny details I’ve obsessed over,” he says.
Much of the artwork is also personal. On the wall as you descend the stairs to the restaurant is a recreation of an aerial photograph of a pink salt lake in western Australia, which Abé says was on the design mood board from very early on (“As an Australian I wanted to get my country into the restaurant without putting kangaroo on the menu,” he says). Texture is another guiding element, with tactile art installations on the walls made from dried plants and mushrooms and also around the chef’s table, located to the far end of the room but within the same space, where paintings of produce such as asparagus, pumpkins, truffles, and tomatoes have been created using different textural techniques. The pictures also contain the initials of Abé’s father, who passed away four years ago, in his honour.
Having been in the industry for 25 years I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to achieve and how I wanted to go about it
Matt Abé
The overall result is something very different from Le Gavroche, which wore its Frenchness on its sleeve with its deep tones, white tablecloths and more ornate artwork. What has been the reaction of Roux regulars to the new space?
“I very much looked at it as a blank canvas. I didn’t feel I had to honour anything,” says Abé. “We’ve had numerous Le Gavroche regulars come in and seen it’s moved the space forward. It’s a different experience but there are still the same measured, considered elements and the same standards, but it’s something very different to what was before. It’s modern but the old school values are 100% maintained. With a lot of restaurants now people are looking back to look forward.
“Something I was apprehensive of was what the regulars would think and whether they would take to it but we’ve had so much positive feedback. People have commented on the vibrancy of the space and how light and airy it feels.”
Operational excellence
As Abé has made changes to the restaurant, so too has the restaurant made him change. He has had to become accustomed to the cooking on the former Le Gavroche’s induction hobs, something completely new to him, and temper his cooking style accordingly.
“Working with induction has been a bit of a learning curve for me,” he admits. “I had used it for boiling water but never for cooking, so it was a really big change for me trying to get used to what number to cook something on and realising that number 10 is too hot for everything. It has made us evolve and change the way we cook slightly because you have to adapt but there are certain things you can’t do that you can with a traditional gas flat top or gas suite.”
The kitchen that he has adopted is sizeable, but then it needs to be given the size of the team. Bonheur employs 16 chefs, with the same number front of house which, for a 46-cover restaurant shows the level of its ambition. The restaurant does turn a few tables for dinner, meaning it can do numbers around the mid sixties “if every table is maxed”.
The team itself is still relatively new, with only one sous chef having worked with Abé previously and most joining him in August to prepare for launch. The restaurant had five soft services before it opened and then it was straight in to cooking food fit for an inspector.
“After the first night I thought it was too good to be true because it went really well,” says Abé, who said he then suffered a “reality check” the following evening when things didn’t go quite as smoothly. “Night number two was a disaster. Some of the timings and communication front and back were off and as the service progressed and I was amping up the pressure a bit the pinch points became obvious. That’s the idea of having softs, to test the parameters and the things you’ve put in place and work on getting them better.”
Another form of soft experience for Abé came in the form of Gordon Ramsay High, the final project of Ramsay’s that he worked on. This was always part of the plan, with Ramsay telling Abé when they first had a conversation about his future pre-Covid that he wanted another five years from him with clear goals that included writing a book and helping with his latest project at 22 Bishopsgate before he would back him for his own project.
Working on the 12-cover counter restaurant, located on the 60th floor of 22 Bishopsgate, from the beginning gave Abé valuable insight into how his own project might play out. “That put me in very good stead. Being involved in it from the beginning, even before it was announced we had the site, allowed me to be heavily involved in the design of the space and the kitchen. Having gone through that process beforehand I felt very confident in coming in here. I was very clear about what I needed to order and was able to make the decisions for myself.”
He describes Ramsay as a “great friend, mentor and father figure” as well as a business partner and says that while they talked over plans for Bonheur Ramsay was very clear that Abé would have complete control over the design. He had support from the Ramsay Group in the beginning, and the group is still there in the background to offer support should he need it, but says the restaurant is very much his baby.
Abé is fully aware of his abilities and the need to meet his full potential, and you’d be foolish to bet against him mirroring his mentor with three stars of his own
“It is my restaurant and name above the door. We very much run the day to day; we have our own lawyers and accounting team and use a different PR agency. Ramsay is a support mechanism if we need to lean into it, but Bonheur is completely separate (from The Ramsay Group).”
As well as no doubt wanting to impress his mentor, the history of the site meant there were other interested parties to add their approval, namely Michel Roux Jr. “I had a coffee with him, and he said he was very happy that the restaurant was going to a like-minded chef,” says Abé. “He said had it gone to a global restaurant chain it just would have lost the history a little bit.”
The former Le Gavroche chef patron came in to dine on a Friday evening that was the restaurant’s fourth service and off the back of its first lunch service and Abé recalls a moment when he was chatting to some of the guests and a member of his team came over and told him that Roux had gone into the kitchen. “I was like ‘just let him go in, he knows his way around’,” says Abé with a smile.
Did Roux impart any pearls of wisdom? “We spoke about petty things such as who does the bins. We are in a unique building with the kitchen downstairs, so everything has to come from street level down and back up again.”
The relentless pursuit of perfection
Now six months into its opening and talk of Ramsay and Roux seems a distraction. With his restaurant’s two-star credentials, Abé has proved that he can stand on his own two feet. His ambition doesn’t end at two stars either. Abé is fully aware of his abilities and the need to meet his full potential, and you’d be foolish to bet against him mirroring his mentor at some point in the future with three stars of his own.
“I wouldn’t say it has gone better than expected because I always hold very high expectations of myself and my team,” Abé says of restaurant’s first six months with an air of confidence, adding that he will continue to keep pushing for improvements. On its website the restaurant says it aims for the highest expression of hospitality with a ‘relentless pursuit of perfection’, and this doesn’t feel like hyperbole.
“Having been in the industry for 25 years I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to achieve and how I wanted to go about it,” he adds. “I know what I want to ultimately achieve and I’m that person that once I set my mind to something I will see it through.”