Restaurant review Bread Street Kitchen, One New Change, 10 Bread Street, London.

One of the many mysteries surrounding Gordon Ramsay is why his cut-the-crap, no-nonsense TV persona is so far removed from the prissiness of his restaurants. On screen he's all blood, sweat and shouting; in his dining rooms it's all lilies, amuse-bouches and murmuring.

Now comes Bread Street Kitchen, the Ramsay group's latest mega-opening in the City, and this time he's doing things differently. It's informal, it's democratic, and it takes its aesthetic from the lofts of Shoreditch rather than the gilded salons of Paris. In short, Gordon's gone groovy. "Drop in and say hello," Bread Street Kitchen's website chummily entreats.

Occupying a substantial slab of One New Change, a shiny development of offices and shops in the shadow of St Paul's, Bread Street Kitchen is just a few steps from Jamie Oliver's Barbecoa, which got there first and nabbed all the cathedral views. Gordon's place is bigger and buzzier than Jamie's, positioning itself as a Wolseley for the City and open from early morning until late at night. As it turns out, the all-day dining option means that a lunch can drag on almost till teatime. But we'll come on to that.

Bread Street Kitchen opened a year later than planned, and apparently cost £5m. When you walk in, you can immediately see why. This isn't a restaurant, it's a small town, with its own microclimate; a monumental space, seating 250, criss-crossed by gantries and flooded with light from wraparound 20 foot-high windows.

Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/