It’s been 14 years since my last kitchen job. In a past life, I was a pair of hands in a failing, bourgeois country pub outside a bridge-and-tunnel town. I was 16, gesturing at a dull pseudo-British pub menu of bread boards and burgers and goujons and gloom.
The menu at The Grill by Tom Booton couldn’t be a more elevated antithesis of that. Booton has had an impact here, and it’s the first time The Dorchester has put a named chef above the door of the Grill. It’s now my home for the next six and a half hours; I’m heading in to do a shift in the kitchen, and see what makes the place tick.
