Eight years after opening his first London restaurant, Tom Kerridge has decided he would like a little more room for drinking.
Kerridge’s Bar & Grill at the Corinthia hotel will reopen on 5 September as two distinct spaces: a smaller, 57-cover restaurant called Kerridge’s and Georgie’s, a new, larger bar space. When the restaurant first opened in 2018, it had around 90 covers. The martini, evidently, has been doing well.
Georgie’s is named after Kerridge’s Boxer, whose paw print was famously made in wet concrete during the building of the chef’s pub The Hand & Flowers in Marlow, and later became the logo of the brand. The new bar will carry that motif through the room while Steve – a full-size bronze figure by Kerridge’s wife Beth Cullen-Kerridge – survives the refurb too.
The serious business is drinking. A dedicated Martini Club will serve Dry, Wet, Dirty and “Steak” versions straight from the freezer, the last being a Gibson-style number finished with a house-smoked pickled onion. Negronis, French 75s and Manhattans will sit alongside British beers, including beers from Marlow’s Rebellion Brewery.
Food is pitched for the point at which one drink becomes several. Pork scratchings, beef jerky and “frickles” (deep-fried pickled things, for the uninitiated) lead to buttermilk fried chicken, haddock fritters, shellfish brioche rolls and a cheeseburger topped with barbecue brisket. Prices have not yet been published, but it is clear this is not a bar built around the idea of one quiet drink before dinner.
Food will be served from noon until 10.30pm Monday to Saturday and until 9pm on Sundays, with drinks continuing later.
Kerridge’s itself is not going anywhere. Behind a velvet partition, head chef Tom Childs will continue to oversee the dining room serving modern British food and Kerridge’s top hits, with a private room for up to 16 guests.
The reshuffle comes during a particularly vocal year for Kerridge outside the kitchen. He is spearheading VAT’s the Problem, a hospitality campaign calling on the government to cut VAT for the sector from 20 to 10 per cent. Backed by UKHospitality, the British Beer & Pub Association and the British Institute of Innkeeping, it now has almost 350,000 signatures. Kerridge has repeatedly argued that rising costs are putting pubs, restaurants and hotels under increasing pressure.
Back at the Corinthia, the changes amount to more than a cosmetic refurb. Taking 33 seats out of the restaurant and creating a bar intended as a destination in its own right is a significant rethink of how the space is being used.
Hotel bars were once largely somewhere to wait for a table. Kerridge is now making the opposite bet: that plenty of people will come without wanting one at all.
