Hot Dinners went to Benares on for the restaurant’s reopening party following three month’s closure and refurbishment after a kitchen fire.
Plenty of chefs had come out to join the celebrations, Hot Dinners spotted Pierre Koffman, Pearl’s Jun Tanaka and Silvena Rowe and, rather randomly, the Radio One DJ Colin Murray. Apparently Antonio Carluccio was also around, although with the sea of guests scoffing down fantastic canapés and endless champagne it was easy to miss someone.
Atul Kochhar declared himself ‘very happy’ with the revamped Benares – it now has a huge banquet table for 36, a private sommelier’s dining room and a really impressive chef’s table (see image below) which will offer a special 15 course menu as guests overlook the action in the kitchen through a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window. ‘We’ll have some cold courses – people don’t really associate cold food with Indian cuisine,’ Atul said, ‘but we’re going to have some amazing cold starters for our guests and then move through every type of Indian style of cooking to desserts.’
Benares opens for business tonight, leaving Kochhar free to spend more time on his other project, opening The Colony Bar and Grill in Marylebone this March. ‘We had always planned to open the Colony this Spring,’ he told us, ‘But the fire happened which is why we’re reopening this now and then going straight on to work on the Colony.’ The menu at the Colony will, according to Atul, feature a tapas-style menu based on Indian street food and one of Benares sous-chefs will head up the kitchen there.
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