The DU Lounge

Celerity

(44,499 posts) Sat May 25, 2024, 02:18 PM May 25

My night at Guy Ritchie's wild supper club

There’s a lavish outdoor fire kitchen, mobile Land Rover ‘pub’ and a rotating cast of celebrity chefs. Hannah Evans gets a first taste of the culinary venture

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/guy-ritchies-supper-club-times-luxury-bpw3bbqd0

https://archive.ph/WV80L

In Guy Ritchie’s latest Netflix crime-com, The Gentlemen, the aristocrat Eddie Horniman, Duke of Halstead, played by Theo James, is in a bit of a pickle. He has inherited a very big, very old country estate and for reasons involving gangsters, drug dealers and a feckless older brother, he needs to get his hands on £8 million, and he has a week to do it. So he decides to diversify — something, he finds out, his father was secretly doing all along with a massive weed farm beneath the estate. You could say Ritchie is in a bit of a similar position. He owns Ashcombe Estate in Wiltshire, a Georgian manor set in 1,200 acres that he bought with ex-wife Madonna. He’s also trying to diversify, except he’s gone down a more refined (and legal) path: luxury supper clubs.

This summer Ritchie combines forces with Carousel, the award-winning London restaurant that specialises in hosting guest chefs from around the world, to put on a series of lavish outdoor dinner parties in collaboration with WildKitchen, Ritchie’s company, which manufactures luxury outdoor tented barbecues. These aren’t anything like the Big Green Egg or Weber Grill you’ve got in the garden at home — a WildKitchen, which costs up to £75,000, is a shrine to outdoor fire cooking: a huge tented barbecue complete with a copper table, wood-fired oven, charcoal grill and utensil rack offering everything you could possibly need, plus much more. You might recognise the kitchen because, as well as appearing in The Gentlemen, the set-up featured in another Netflix blockbuster (Ritchie really knows about good marketing): the Beckhams (his good friends) have a WildKitchen with room for 12 at their home in the Cotswolds, which could be seen in the documentary Beckham, released last year.

Over eight weekends this summer, starting this month, eight chefs from around the world will host 18 guests for arguably the most exclusive supper club of the summer (tickets from £175 per person). Each chef will host three sittings over the weekend: two dinners and a lunch. There’s also the option — starting at an additional £175 per person — to sleep over in one of the six en suite bedrooms at a newly renovated farmhouse on the estate. Ritchie won’t be there himself but you will be eating in his own personal WildKitchen, which sits beside a lake in the grounds. As for the chefs, they’re just as big as the stars who appear in his films. On May 31 and June 1 it is the turn of Niklas Ekstedt, the Swedish fire cooking pioneer, and the weekend of June 14-15 there’s Chet Sharma, the founder of the award-winning Indian restaurant BiBi in London. When I visited for dinner — the first of the series — we were being cooked for by the acclaimed Mexican chef Adriana Cavita, whose London restaurant Cavita opened two years ago and has become one of the hottest dinner locations in the city.

Guy Ritchie has teamed up with the London restaurant Carousel to put on a series of lavish outdoor dinner parties

“Each chef will bring a different vibe,” explains Ollie Templeton, Carousel’s co-founder, who will help each chef with service and cooking. “Adriana is super lovely and her food is vibrant and all about sharing. Niklas is a bit more serious and he’s bringing more chefs with him.” The slogan for WildKitchen is “cashmere caveman”. “We’re more cavemen, without the cashmere,” Templeton says, laughing. But speaking to the other guests it becomes clear it’s an apt description. We’re enjoying welcome drinks — either champagne or bottles of Ritchie’s beer, Gritchie; there’s a brewery on the estate — on the terrace in the farmyard, with gorgeous views of Cranborne Chase, a designated National Landscape. The crowd is a mix of local friends who are just coming for the dinner and couples who have driven down from London. There’s a famous interior designer and several men who, I overhear, are very successful investment bankers. In the car park is a line of Mercedes, Audis and a Rolls-Royce.

snip