Bacchanalia

Bacchanalia opened at One Mount Street in late 2022 as Richard Caring’s most opulent bet yet, and it does not do subtle. Winged horses and a Medusa by Damien Hirst gallop across a hand-painted ceiling, genuine two-thousand-year-old Greek and Roman antiquities sit in cases around the room, and the whole space is designed to make the restaurant’s name feel like an instruction rather than a description.

The menu draws on Greek and Italian cooking, and the kitchen is capable of real quality: sea bream and a mushroom risotto have both been singled out as highlights by reviewers, and the cocktail list plays along with the theme, mixing feta with watermelon and prosecco, or white chocolate with Greek yoghurt. Portions have been a recurring complaint, and at these prices that stings more than it would elsewhere.

This is a room built for a big night rather than a quiet dinner, and it suits a celebration, a client dinner on someone else’s card, or anyone who wants to eat surrounded by genuine antiquities and a Hirst sculpture overhead. It does not suit anyone counting the cost of the evening as they go.

Bacchanalia is a spectacle first and a restaurant second, and reviews since opening have been genuinely mixed on whether the food matches the surroundings. The interiors alone are worth seeing once. Whether the bill matches the plate in front of you is a more debatable question, and one worth asking before you sit down.