Having visited Galvin's La Chapelle and Bistrot de Luxe a few times before, we have become fans of the magical food, great atmosphere and super friendly, professional and attentive staff so we were very eager to try the newest addition at the Atheneum hotel ... maybe a bit too eager and maybe with a bit too high expectations. Triggered by an emailing from Galvin and the ambious website we made a reservation for a table and a three course set menu which would give us a free glass of bubbly.
We arrived at the restaurant which is at the backside of the ground floor of the hotel and found it almost empty at Saturday 8 PM. The atmosphere was immediately more that of a 'hotel restaurant' than a Galvin restaurant. We were shown to a nice round table for four and given the menu with the set menus and the choice between meat, fish, veg for both starters and main.
After a while I asked about the glass of Champagne and I got a response like "oh you would want it now?" Well yes, I guess it would be nice as an apperitif right? Even then it took a very long time, maybe ten more minutes, before we got the drinks (while there were still not a lot of other guests).
With ordering the food we also ordered a bottle of white wine which was directly poured into our glasses, while we had hardly sipped our glass of champagne, so now we had our nice glasses of white wine warming up while we started eating our starters and drinking our champagne.
We did not get an amuse-bouche and no bread while waiting for the food, although there were small side plates one would expect to use for bread. Don't know if this is common practice, just a small mistake or if this is because we had the set menu.
The food was good, I really enjoyed the starter which was a duck parfait and the main which was sea trout perfectly cooked. The dessert was a very tasty caramel apple tart.
One of my friends had the lamb chop which was a bit difficult to eat, especially because the knife was not a good meat knife and while I would guess somebody could have seen her struggle nobody was attentive enough to provide her with a proper knife.
The same lamb was actually not part of the set menu so was ordered separately and of course we expected to pay extra but we were surprised to see her glass of bubbly added to the bill because she had choosn something outside of the set menu. After notifying our surprise this got swiftly taken of the bill.
I could not find the toilet, there are no signs and the doors could easily give access to another part of the hotel so I had to come back past reception to ask where it was.
Although there were really not a lot of guests there were no more towels to dry my hands.
Overall we were really very disappointed as we totally not had the same experience as we have had before at Galvin restaurants. Staff was absolutely not attentive while there were only a few tables with people.
The restaurant is a rather OK option if you stay at the hotel anyway although many other options are close by and better. Let's see if they will improve because they have only be open for not so long or I'll just have to change my expectations level. read more