Colbert

Excellent food, wonderful service and lively but refined ambience.

Food - 10/10 service - 10/10 decor - 7/10 atmosphere - 9/10 price - 7/10.

Great local restaurant - buzzing from breakfast to midnight- love it.

Like its sister restaurants, The Wolseley and The Delaunay, Cafe Colbert suffers from its excessive popularity. Whereas The Wolseley handles it with elegance and The Delaunay with considerable competence (it is a very large restaurant), Cafe Colbert simply cannot cope. This is the restaurant to go to if you like your London on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Should you be fortunate and coincide with the Japanese maitre d', then you are in luck as she runs the place like a tight ship. A good captain calms the crew. Should you not see her when you walk in, don't stay. By all means be considerate and decline your booking. This is a popular restaurant. Be firm, claim sudden illness and quickly dash elsewhere. The food is good as is the layout of the tables. The place is charming in its decoration. It could be a fun and vibrant place where one can have a wonderful time. However, an atmosphere of staff running about bug-eyed and on the verge of hysteria will gradually get to you. The last time I was there for lunch, my guest and I left panting. I have not been for breakfast, but friends tell me that breakast is the ideal time for the Colbert. My family and I have had tea there as well and it was excellent and (for the Colbert) reasonably relaxed. Time has now passed since its opening when it replaced the much-loved Oriel. Rather than growing comfortable in its skin the Colbert seems to be getting worse. This morning I tried to book by telephone for lunch in two weeks. I was told that the computer was down. I could either call in two days or go personally and "try to book". I was polite (with difficulty) and said nothing. However, it will be a while before Cafe Colbert sees me again. The alternatives around Sloane Square are legion.

A great bonus to the SW1 and 3 eating scene. We went for a pre-theatre meal and it was thoroughly enjoyable as all the restaurants are in this group, good food well served in a delightful ‘French brasserie’ style room. Lovely.

Sloane Square manages to be one of the most outwardly pretty yet utterly vacuous London addresses and at 5 to six on a late week workday night, also seems to be home to more arseholes per square foot than a builders bum convention. Within seconds of leaving the tube I've been buffeted by a spry fool in a pinstripe oblivious to anything but a night on the ‘lesh’ with the boys ("on my way down the King's Road now squire, you'll spot me, I'm looking seriously sexy tonight") and watched as some infernal permatanned, pashmina clad princesses did her level best to get knocked over by one of the smug Astons prowling the Square by waltzing straight in front of it assuming that it would (like everything else in life) fit around her. After that Colbert was a warm buzzing welcome. While a number of the arseholes had inevitably found their way indoors to loudly complain about the paucity of the residents parking in Ken and Chelski, there was enough space for me to slip unobserved onto a stool at the handsome marble bar. It's a classy old fashioned sort of space that, with its comfortable booths and waistcoated French staff feels like it has been there since way before George Devine reopened the Court next door in 1952. In actual fact, it's been there for less than 2 years, when uber-restaurateurs Jeremy King and Chris Corbin took advantage of a famous tiff between the landlord and previous tenants Oriel in which the latter were booted out following a terrible meal experienced by the Earl of Cadogan and his family. Most people would have just refused to leave a tip. Service is friendly, prompt and efficient (perhaps mindful of the fate of their predecessors) and it'd be hard not to recommend the location at least as a great spot for dinner before a show at nearby Cadogan Hall or the Court. The food was fine brasserie fare, though maybe just without quite the oomph I'd been hoping for. Mini house baguettes were toasty warm spears of delight, built for scooping up thick butter, ideally the garlicky sort I'd been hoping for along with my starter of l'escarcots. The snails were plump, mild and inoffensive little fellows, like schoolboys from a minor public school. Their buttery bed was pleasant enough, though not a patch on the earthily vulgar bunch I got mugged by at Zedels. Admittedly though, these ones didn't make you feel that you'd be growling parsley and garlic at people during interval drinks. A Salad Nicoise was fine, but much less than the sum of its parts. Most of those parts were excellent, with the exception of a lump of slightly dry tuna, but it was difficult to ignore the keen £17.50 price point for a handful of haricots vert and an, admittedly perfectly cooked, egg. The rest of the menu is textbook grand brasserie, with moules, confits and a section for crustacia. Plus plats du jour, all day dejeuner and some rather exciting looking patisserie to finish and you can breakfast all day or lunch from noon until night. If I'm in the area I just well might do either, or both. And it'd be the ideal place for your slightly risqué maiden aunt, just make sure she's paying.

Colbert, while not flawless, is a great addition to the Chelsea dining – and especially lunching – scene. So much so that it is always jam packed with locals, tourists, theatere goers shoppers and what seems another 10,000 or so people. If you do sneak a table the food is dependable without being genre defining, my only quibble is the ambient noise which is well beyond “buzzling” and a wine list which does not match the food offering very well. But compared to the pieces of plastic in my last main course at the old and towards its end vile “Oriels” at the same premises it is light years of improvement! Let us hope Colbert does not fall pray to its own success.

Overpriced and not worth the hype. Such a shame that the food is so mediocre when everything else is ok or great. If you are on Sloane Square, Cote is much better value for food and The Botanist is better value all round.

Today I called the restaurant to make a reservation for 2 for breakfast…for a wednesday. After welcoming me by telling me that they needed the table back by 11am, they proceeded to take my name. I then told them that I was coming with a small pram. At that point, the girl on the phone tells me that the new rule by the owners is that under no circumstance prams are allowed neither in the restaurant nor in the side bar any time of the day (these were her literal words). You decide whether you think this place is heaven or not but I find people who make such rules not worthy of a visit (with or without pram).