Chefpocalypse Now!

Is the age of the celebrity chef finally over?

I am so sorry, this is AI. What I really wanted was a version of the Apocalypse Now poster with Marlon Brando as a chef, but due to a lack of paid subs, I couldn’t afford to commission an illustrator to do it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Celebrity chefs have been making the headlines recently, but for all the wrong reasons. And no, I’m not talking about Ye’s biggest fan, John Torode, who hasn’t been a working chef since his restaurant The Luxe closed in 2013. Earlier this month, The Purge of Harrods saw a major shake-up of the high-end department store’s restaurant offerings with Tom Kerridge, Calum Franklin, Gordon Ramsay and Masayoshi Takayama of three Michelin-starred New York restaurant Masa all exiting stage left. Jason Atherton’s Hot Dogs by Three Darlings shut up shop at Harrods in April after just eight months of trading (it was described as a ‘pop-up’ in reports of its closure but not in coverage of its launch, so it may or may not have been designed to be a short-term thing). It followed the shuttering in December 2024 of the flagship Studio Frantzén by Swedish chef Björn Frantzén, who holds three stars at restaurants in both Stockholm and Singapore but failed to pick up even a single star at Harrods, or make much of an impact at all with his UK debut (I went. It was a bit pants).

You may be thinking, ‘so what’? A bunch of inconsequential diffusion range restaurants aimed at people with more money than taste or sense have disappeared into the ether; good riddance to them. But it’s Harrods’ decision to replace those big-name chefs with concepts developed in-house that’s the most interesting aspect of the story. It is perhaps an indication that celebrity chefs are no longer the draw they once were.

At the just-opened Chancery Rosewood luxury hotel in the former American Embassy in Grosvenor Square (where one of the 144 suites - there’s nothing as common as a room - will cost you a minimum of £1400), the line-up of restaurants is noticeably light on celebrity chefs. Yes, Masayoshi Takayama has put his name to Tobi Masa, an omakase restaurant serving the likes of Peking duck tacos, toro tartare, and shiso ink pasta, but otherwise the offer is pretty generic. There’s ‘Southern Mediterranean cuisine’ at Serra, deli food at GSQ, the rooftop Eagle Bar and afternoon tea at Jacqueline, where the cakes are made by ‘famed pâtissier Marius Dufay’. Does a ‘famed pâtissier’ count as a celebrity chef? Maybe, although I’ve never heard of him (by bad, obvs).

Masa Takayama traps a flying cigar between his fingers without looking. Dude!