I Tried Gordon Ramsay’s New Lucky Cat Restaurant From the Netflix Show - Is It Actually Worth the Money?

If you’ve watched the Netflix series about Gordon Ramsay opening Lucky Cat at 22 Bishopsgate, it’s hard not to be curious. The show gives the place a kind of cinematic glow. Dramatic skyline views, high-pressure kitchens and the sense that this is a restaurant where every detail matters.

So naturally I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and timed it with an overdue celebration of a few life events that needed celebrating to justify the big splash out.

We booked a Wednesday lunch a couple of weeks in advance, which was surprisingly easy. This is not one of those restaurants you need to stalk for months to get a table. It felt accessible, which was reassuring.

Lucky Cat sits squarely in the Big Treat category. The prices make that clear straight away. But the atmosphere is much more relaxed than you might expect from somewhere charging fine dining numbers. Nobody looked particularly dressed up, and no one seemed to feel the need to be. The room had a steady hum of people in white shirts clearly having corporate lunches on corporate cards, mixed with people like us who had decided to make a midweek splash.

Service was excellent. Attentive without being oppressive, which is a balance many restaurants struggle to strike. The staff were warm, present and clearly on top of things.

At one point our final dish, the uber expensive, hyped black cod, lagged for close to half an hour. They were apologetic and checked in with us, but we were not too bothered. The room was pleasant, the view was doing its thing, the lighting for photographs was unparalleled and nothing felt hurried. The tables around us were not turning over quickly either, which meant you could settle in and enjoy the novelty of the experience rather than feeling like you were on a timer. For a while, it was very enjoyable.

How much are the dishes at Gordon Ramsay’s New Restaurant?

The sashimi prices were broadly comparable to nice Japanese restaurants and nicely served. The signature chicken was lovely; crisp, flavourful and beautifully cooked. But was it five times better than the Korean fried chicken I’ve got from a van at the Edinburgh Festival? Probably not. And it came in small as a sharer. That slightly awkward calculation is something you find yourself doing throughout the meal.

The black cod, when it finally arrived, was extraordinary. Silky, rich and perfectly balanced. One of those dishes where the table goes quiet because everyone is concentrating on what’s in front of them. It is also nearly £50 (plus service) In the moment you forgive/repress that because it tastes phenomenal. In the cold light of day, as you walk away from the restaurant, you do find yourself wondering whether anything roughly the size of a clenched fist can realistically justify that price tag.

Still, it was excellent.

Is the food at Lucky Cat 22 Bishopsgate worth it?

The bigger issue with Lucky Cat is not that the food is bad, much of it is very good. The problem is that it rarely feels elevated enough to match the prices being charged. Strip away the Wagyu nods and the skyline view, and a lot of what’s on the menu are dishes you would absolutely expect to find in your local Asian sit-down restaurant. Bao, fried chicken, sushi, noodles. Perfectly nice things to eat, but not exactly rare or difficult to find done well elsewhere.

We’ve had better sushi at Roku, a little restaurant tucked away in Kelham Island in Sheffield. We’ve had better Korean fried chicken standing in the rain at the Edinburgh Fringe.

And if we are talking about value, it is difficult not to notice that for roughly the same price as this lunch you could have a full evening tasting menu at a newly minted Michelin-starred restaurant Joro in Sheffield for about £125 a head, and for an extra £40 you can stay overnight.

If you are looking for a genuinely bouji, special occasion food experience, Lucky Cat is not quite that.

The food feels casual, even though the bill decidedly isn’t.

The world's worst bao bun

Which brings us to the tofu and avocado bao. Something that, as a consumer expert with a keen awareness for a value of money, I will probably be thinking about once a week for the rest of my life. The signature Netflix Bao was off, so we opted for this instead.

This was, without exaggeration, one of the biggest restaurant rip-offs I have encountered in years.

Two pale buns arrived looking as though they had been assembled with absolutely no love whatsoever. No garnish, no flourish, nothing to lift them beyond the most basic interpretation of the dish. Just tofu, a smear of avocado and the vague sense that someone had given up halfway through plating it. For £16.

Add the 15 percent service charge and you are suddenly paying more than £18 for something I would have expected more effort from in a supermarket. Except, without the Gordon Ramsay brand carefully embossed into it – not an item I would personally want to brand my name onto actually. If you’re a Next Level Chef fan, it’s giving basement kitchen.

For a man famous for obsessive attention to detail, it was baffling. Gordon Ramsay has built an entire career on noticing the tiniest flaws in other people’s cooking. How something this unloved made it onto the menu is genuinely difficult to understand. If it had been served in Hell’s Kitchen, you’d be scared to be in the splash zone as it might get punched into the counter.

And the problem with a dish like that is that it lingers.

Restaurants at this price point rely on trust. When you are spending serious money, you want to believe that anything you order will be good, even if it is not spectacular. Once that confidence is broken, it changes the entire experience. Because suddenly you are wondering what other disappointing horrors might be lurking elsewhere on the menu if you happen to make a bad selection.

Is there a cheaper way to experience Lucky Cat, 22 Bishopsgate?

There is a way to experience Lucky Cat without committing quite so heavily. The restaurant offers a £35 lunch menu, which on paper feels like a neat way to soak up the view, the room and the Ramsay atmosphere at a fixed price.

But this is London, and the maths rarely stops at the headline number. By the time you add a couple of drinks, the service charge and the general gravitational pull of a menu where everything else looks more interesting than the set options, that £35 lunch quietly creeps upwards. It is still cheaper than going fully à la carte, but it does not quite deliver the bargain it initially promises (and the beleaguered bun is one of the items)

The Final Verdict on Lucky Cat

Lucky Cat is not a bad restaurant. The room is beautiful, the service is polished and there are dishes on the menu that are genuinely excellent.

Even the bathrooms, which were admittedly extremely premium and stocked with Diptyque hand lotion that I enthusiastically applied in the spirit of clawing something back from the bao situation, could not quite shift the feeling that something about the meal had not stacked up.

But in the end, the question everyone asks after watching the Netflix show is whether it is worth the money. After all the pomp and circumstance of the lift to the top, you are unceremoniously ejected, through a corporate corridor, into the street through a backdoor at the end.

If you are spending this kind of money on a meal, you can get far more interesting food, more thoughtful cooking and a more memorable experience by seeking out chefs who are brilliant rather than just one with a famous name over the door. I love Gordon Ramsay and think the quality he stands for is well worth paying for, but this diluted it a little for me.

How to get access to fancy restaurant food without the bouji bill

1. Go for the set lunch menu

Many expensive restaurants quietly offer much cheaper lunch menus during the week. These are usually fixed-price menus that let you experience the kitchen’s style without ordering multiple small plates.

Because the price is set, you can keep control of your budget and still eat somewhere impressive. In London especially, it’s common to see £30–£45 lunch menus at restaurants where dinner could easily cost double that.

2. Book a chef’s table or tasting menu

It sounds counterintuitive, but tasting menus can sometimes be better value than ordering à la carte.

You know the price upfront, the kitchen chooses the dishes, and you often get a curated selection of the restaurant’s best plates. That means fewer expensive impulse decisions and a more cohesive experience.

For special occasions, it can actually work out cheaper than ordering several small plates individually. The newly Michelin starred Sheffield Restaurant Joro offer midweek dine and stay packages that give you a premium room + a glorious tasting menu from £125 each (significantly cheaper than the bill for lunch at Lucky Cat)

3. Look out for soft launches

One of the best-kept restaurant secrets is the soft launch period when a new restaurant first opens.

During this time, many restaurants offer 50% off food while the kitchen and service team settle in. It’s essentially a rehearsal period for the restaurant, but for diners it can mean Michelin-level cooking at half the price.

Food newsletters, restaurant blogs and social media accounts often flag these deals when they appear.

4. Try early evening or pre-theatre menus

Many high-end restaurants offer early evening deals designed for theatre-goers or after-work diners.

These menus are usually limited in choice but significantly cheaper than peak dinner service. If you are happy eating a little earlier, it can be a great way to try somewhere expensive without committing to a full evening spend.

5. Save the splurge for places where the food is the star

Finally, if you are going to spend serious money on a meal, it is worth choosing restaurants where the cooking itself is the main event, rather than somewhere trading primarily on a famous name or a great view.

When the food is the real focus, the whole experience tends to feel far more memorable - and much easier to justify when the bill arrives.