Penson Group has completed its latest restaurant ‘Ascot Grill’, in the heart of Ascot for its highly reputed owner John Rampello.

Penson was commissioned on the same day that contractors started work with completion in just 5 weeks. A
 massive ‘ask’ for a programme normally settable at being 14 weeks. As such a very fast design phase has been skilfully completed leaving a venue that opened in time for Ascot Week and ever since has been fully booked during lunch and evenings with repeat customers already flocking back.

John Rampello, Ascot grill owner explained: "Ascot Grill has already been a great success and we are delighted with the design prepared at double-quick speed by Penson, who also designed our venue at Wentworth. Customers love the clever balance between freshness, snugness and atmosphere and we are delighted with the commercials that Penson bring with their schemes. They understand where our issues are, whilst generating wonderful restaurants. Penson are looking at a large bar venue for us and we can't wait to see their ideas for that!"

Penson’s schemes are always unique and this particular interior design has been carefully specified to bring lushness from deep English brown and green velvets to create a lovely snug feel, balanced with the vibrancy and long-lasting white marble floor which will tarnish well with use. Semi-opaque silk sheers soften and divide the spaces whilst binding the contrasting hardness and softness of the velvets and marble. 

Penson’s scheme plays upon a number of contrasts with enormous success. The marble brings freshness, whilst the velvets glisten as you walk past them offering a wide variation of colours ranging from gold to the darkest green imaginable.

The honed marble brings a sense of a noisy Italian (John Rampello was born in Naples) and the velvet is highly British (and after all, Ascot is highly British); whilst the 35 day aged Argentinean steaks are very Argentinean. As such Ascot Grill merges a number of characters so it’s hard to pigeon hole the venue’s menu and interior design as being anything in particular. This is what PENSON wanted to achieve in working closely with its client to develop another ‘non-categorised’ venue.

Prawn Cocktail and Trifle feature heavily in the menu, as do the many well selected wines that are of a modest cost, yet have been sourced by someone who knows their way around good-value wines. There is not one Sancerre in sight, but, better wines that you’ve not heard of that are cheaper and more palatable. The interior scheme has a similar ripple to it, in that the surfaces are all fairly economical, but give a great combined punch overall during the day and especially during the darker hours. 

It has great acoustics too. The hard floor creates a sensible level of background noise, to add to a lively atmosphere. However, the noise is stopped from rattling too far by the velvets to retain the perfect blend of noise, atmosphere but with the required privacy levels.

Penson has taken a slightly random approach with various items. The chairs for example all slightly differ. Some have velvet backs, some don’t. Some have velvet piping, some don’t. What is common throughout it the chairs cross section, so that when in rows the chairs establish a neat linear form.