Midland Grand restaurant is home to first ever curved Athanor cook suite
Formerly the Gilbert Scott, the newly named Midland Grand at The Renaissance Hotel, St Pancras, is home to one of London’s most iconic dining rooms. It is now also home to the UK’s only curved Athanor cook suite.
After the Gilbert Scott closed, the restaurant lay dormant for some time, thanks to covid, but re-opened in late 2023 under its new name and the watchful eye of executive chef, Patrick Powell, whose impressive CV includes running the kitchens at Allegra and Chiltern Firehouse.
Prior to re-opening The Renaissance Hotel had a major refurbishment by designer Hugo Toro and at the same time there was a fairly major overhaul of the kitchen which included the installation of the new curved Athanor suite. The elongated shape of the kitchen meant that an island suite wasn’t really an option and so there was little choice but to position the suite along the wall, even though it has a distinct curve.
‘I had worked with Steve and the team at Grande Cuisine team previously – we had an Athanor suite at Allegra – and I knew that if anybody could pull off what we needed here, they could. The kitchen here is galley style, so very different from Allegra, where everyone walks around the stove. As a result, the new suite is very much more like an “old school” cook line.
‘The restaurant here is quite big, and we also have to serve food for the bar, chef’s table, private dining room and the terrace that opens in the summer, so we’ve got a lot of seats and therefore a lot of food needs to come from the stove. It also needs to operate all day as we are open from around 12pm until late evening in some capacity or other – eventually we’ll be open for breakfast as well. So, we needed a strong, reliable cook suite, with a lot of firepower, that can go on all day.
‘The suite itself is essentially divided into individual sections. On the sauce section we have a gas grill which is not something I would normally be too keen on but given the nature of the building we can’t cook with wood or charcoal, so this option works well for us. Next to this we have a large plancha with three hot holding drawers below. So, immediately, you can see that we have a lot of power for cooking, grilling, searing and holding meat. Next to this we have the fish section which consists of a half sized plancha and two induction hobs. The suite is completed by two further induction hobs, a double fryer and another half sized plancha for garnish and sides.
‘In the morning the suite is filled with pots of sauces reducing and whatever we need with regards to mise-en-place, then we strip it completely and set it up for service, whereafter it stays in service mode all day. After reducing the sauces on the planchas we turn them down and get them ready for service. We cook directly on them during service – we do a lot of cooking on the planchas! Personally, I think the most consistent way of cooking is on an Athanor plancha, it’s just always the same, it’s always good.
‘I’ve been lucky enough to work on Athanor suites before, the one at Wild Honey was already seven or eight years old when I started working there but it was perfect, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. But it’s not just about the suite, it’s also about the service that comes with it from Grande Cuisine. I remember one evening we had a spring go on an oven door and I was the last one in the kitchen. Steve’s engineer, Bob, came in that night with a replacement oven door, put it on, and took the other one away – I even remember helping him carry it up the stairs! I was like, “wow”, that’s brilliant service.
Allegra was pre-covid, and things were very different then, budgets were a lot tighter this time around. But we really needed a new suite here because the existing suite was already a 10 year old model when it was installed. We had multiple people come out, look at it, and try to do something with it, but we couldn’t get the parts anymore, and were just haemorrhaging money – we had to get a new suite. Although much of the equipment in the kitchen has been here a while, the priority for us was to have a stove with the reliability, build quality and firepower to cope with the demand we have here and that’s why we chose to invest in an Athanor. I am glad we did because it’s an amazing piece of kit.