Hot on the heels of Michel Roux Jr shutting up shop at the much-genuflected-over Le Gavroche, he’s recently opened Chez Roux at the Langham hotel in central London. Roux has since said that he does not plan to cook much at all from now on: daytime TV and caring for his grandkids are much more his penchant these days, he says, rather than sweating over homard grillé and salsifi au beurre noisette.
And who can blame him? Fine-dining restaurants may be glamorous, but cooking in them is hot, filthy, smelly and often thankless. Roux deserves endless happy, horizontal moments wearing his athleisure pants while solving the ad-break conundrums on Countdown, but where that leaves Chez Roux is something of an enigma. It operates evenings-only in the Palm Court space of the hotel, which cannot fail to feel chintzy no matter how much they spend on modernist objets d’art, because its tables are rather low and the accompanying velvet chairs are on the low side, too. This is the sort of low table you more commonly associate with a seaside fortune teller, and causes even a titch of a woman such as myself to stoop over her lemon sole meunière.
