Gordon Ramsay’s new London restaurant serves up Electro-Voice tech

As the Operations Manager of Gordon Ramsay Holdings, Angela Downes, explained: “When we at Gordon Ramsay Restaurants put so much effort into every ingredient, presentation, service and venue, we want to feel that the audio design and installation has had the same attention to detail.”

Unfortunately, even though the high ceilings and hard surfaces may alone have stimulated a few F words amongst the engineers there were further issues to consider. Most notably, the fact that the restaurant is open from morning to late at night every night the engineers had to consider the noise-emission byelaws and the importance of sustainability.

Despite this, Gunton cooked up an installation scheme to overcome all these issues.

His first step was to carve up the restaurant into a number of acoustic zones. This was achieved with the aid of computer simulations which informed Gunton that seven such zones was the most palatable approach. Of these seven zones the restaurant, wine bar and reception area marked up the three main customer facing zones.

Gunton then made Electro-Voice’s ZX3 loudspeakers the centrepiece of the installation. In total, 20 of these two-way loudspeakers were deployed. These were powered by three CPS8.5 Class D loudspeakers equipped with RCM-810 remote-control modules.

So what about the system control and sound processing?

“In our view, absolute control of the sound level in the individual areas was imperative at all times,” explained Gunton.

So how was this achieved? Gunton installed an Electro-Voice NetMaxN8000 digital matrix controller. Most importantly, this could be controlled using PWS-4 wall panels. This set up allows staff at the Bread Street Kitchen the opportunity to control the volume and tone in each of the areas individually.

So, what was the icing on the cake—last contrived culinary reference, I promise—according to Gunton?  “Thanks to NetMax and the IRIS-Net software, we can also access the installation from our company headquarters, which means the customer can count on our support and supervision without any of our team actually having to be present on site. This guarantees optimized preventative maintenance and at the same time saves time and money. It therefore represents an enormous advantage for our customers.”

The Bread Street Kitchen opened in September 2011.