Le Chabanais closed due to gas leak
Le Chabanais restaurant in Mayfair is currently closed due to a ‘gas leak' which occurred on Saturday (15 August) evening.
It will remain closed today (17 August) and hopes to reopen tomorrow according to a spokesperson for the restaurant.
He said: "We have experienced some problems but are working hard to resolve the issue. Hopefully we will get it sorted today but we will be open for service tomorrow as normal.
"We have had to close as a temporary measure and have people in today working on it. It was difficult to get someone out sooner due to the time the incident occurred."
Le Chabanais - which is named after a Parisian brothel - has been failing to excite critics, with both the food and interior coming under attack.
It has now suffered a further blow with reports that Paris chef Inaki Aizpitarte and his team from Le Chateuabriand in Paris have split with the London restaurant.
In a telephone interview with Bloomberg.com, Aizpitarte said: "I've finished my contract: everything is finished. I cannot talk about it."
Le Chabanais was conceived by Varun Talreja, a film producer, together with Aizpitarte and his partners Franck Audoux and Laurent Cabut.
The restaurant opened to invited guests for previews in May, and shortly closed again due to problems with the extraction system in the kitchen.
It opened to the public in June, receiving far from warm reviews with Joseph Connelly from The Telegraphdescribing it as "madly overpriced".
Jay Rayner of The Observersaid: "How much per square metre does it cost to clad a room in tarnished brass? Nail that figure and you could put a hard numerical value on what's wrong with Le Chabanais. Because something has gone very wrong. Not with the food, which is interesting, if rather less interesting than it thinks it is. But in the very notion of this restaurant off Mayfair's Berkeley Square."
Le Chateaubriand team to open Le Chabanais in London >>
