OPENS APRIL 2020
Fans of Café Le Cordon Bleu in Bloomsbury will be pleased to learn that the prestigious French cookery school has launched a brand new site on Fleet Street to mark the 125th anniversary of the first Le Cordon Bleu school in Paris.
The culinary institution has been turning out high-class chefs since 1895 and describes itself as ‘the leading culinary arts, wine and management school in Great Britain’ as well as ‘the guardian of French culinary techniques’. It has unveiled this new restaurant, café and cooking school across two storeys of a building in Fleet Street that once housed Reuters and, more recently, Sir Terence Conran’s Lutyens restaurant.
The new project is the flagship London site for the brand and promotes the school in the capital, allowing budding chefs at the school to gain work experience while completing their qualifications.
The 90-cover restaurant, however, is run by professional chefs rather than catering students. Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday, it offers tasting menus, à la carte options and a £25 weekly changing set lunch menu aimed squarely at the local corporate market with a promise to have diners in and out within 90 minutes. As at Le Cordon Bleu’s other restaurants around the globe – Lima, Ottawa, Paris, Tokyo and Tabarja, Lebanon – diners can expect dishes comprising high-quality, seasonal ingredients treated with bold creativity and artistically presented.
There’s also a 30-cover café called CORD, which serves French patisseries baked on-site daily, as well as offering sandwiches, salads and soups for light lunches.
Twenty thousand students are trained by the worldwide network of Le Cordon Bleu Institutes every year. Le Cordon Bleu opened its first London school in Chelsea in 1931. Fleet Street will be the second London outpost of the school and complements the existing Bloomsbury Square school, which also has a café.