Food & Drink 4
Service 3
Atmosphere 3
Value 3
Becoming a regular haunt
I've eaten here both at lunchtime and dinner and will return in the future. I like the slightly wacky (modernist) approach the restauarant takes: Basil plants insteat of flowers on the table, old paperbacks (Enid Blyton Famous Five this time) as check folders and an anything but standard menu. Service most of the time is attentive though, when they're coming towards the end of a shift the waiting staff can lose focus. There's an excellent wine list all at very reasonable prices (for London) and it's not full of all the usual overpriced, over expressed wine bar favourites. I don't know too many mid-market restaurants that have Reislings, Geverztraminer and Vioniers as standards. It can be noisy in this once office space stripped bare of any sound absorbing materials so, if you want to have a conversation, ask for a table to the right of the bar or one of the two booths to the left.
Food & Drink 2
Service 1
Atmosphere 4.5
Value 1.5
A group of 8 of us went on a Thursday night for drinks and dinner to celebrate a friend's birthday. The atmosphere was buzzing, just what you expect from the City. We started by ordering cocktails which our waiter tasted before serving, but despite pulling a face which showed that he did not like the coctails he had made, he still served them to us. They tasted vile. Once we were seated the waitressing staff were cold and didn't make us feel in any way welcome. Some of our drinks orders were forgotten. Also some of the food was served cold. It is a shame because the dishes that arrived that were warm tasted and look good. We were also caught out at the end of the evening on our drinks bill. They wine menu showed wine as £10 which we assumed to be a bottle. It turns out in the low lighting we had not seen the much smaller print, which ran vertically up the side of the border, that the price quoted was not the bottle price which was double what we thought! When we raised this issue with the waiter, he went and told his manager, whose reaction showed that he did not care! Had we not been there to celebrate a birthday we would have made more of a fuss and refused to pay but we didnt want to spoil our friends evening. Its a shame as I was looking forward to trying the sister venue, the Folly, but after that night I shant be going there!