Vive Le Gavroche! Inside the last days of a true icon

It was the restaurant that revolutionised London dining, and gave the world Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay. Ahead of its closure on Saturday, Mike Daw joins the kitchen to see what the world will be missing when it’s gone

COME this Saturday, one of this country's most famous restaurants, which forever changed the landscape of eating out in Britain, will close. Once the last of the guests have tottered out and Joao Encarcanao Fernandes, the kitchen porter, downs his drying cloth, Michel Roux Jr's Le Gavroche will be no more. It is somewhere that has endured since 1967, making history as the years passed. It was the first in the country to win one Michelin star, the first to win two, and then, finally, the first to win three. No closure can take those records away.

But collecting a galaxy was the least of it. Gavroche's greatest legacy is witnessed in the chefs who came through. its kitchens: Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, Jun Tanaka, Monica Galetti, Pierre Koffmann, Rowley Leigh, Paul Rankin and Bryn Williams.

They all cut their teeth here. There are more, of course. This is a restaurant that has remained a cornerstone of an entire industry for decades not bad for a basement named after "the street urchin" from Les Miserables.

On the closure of the restaurant Roux has said: "The day-to-day pressure of running a restaurant is not getting any easier. I feel for any young independent restaurateur opening up now." He added, "The end of the current lease gave the opportunity to assess and consider the future, and I'd like the restaurant to close on a high." Roux's words of caution seemed prescient as this week's news came through; a glut of long-standing restaurants across London and the UK have announced their closures. From Simon Rimmer's Greens, a pioneering vegetarian restaurant open for 33 years near Manchester to Copper & Ink, the Blackheath restaurant founded by MasterChef finalist Tony Rodd, no one is impervious to headwinds around business rates, rent hikes and the ever-increasing costs of ingredients and staff.