An evening out at MalMaison is a grand affair. Just rolling up to Malmaison you feel all grand and special, either that or seriously out of place and wishing you'd just gone to the local steak house, somewhere where your jeans and trainers would not bring looks of scorn and shame but more ooooh I fancy a pair of those. I digress. But pushing those feelings aside, it's sort of special to book a night out at Mal as it is affectionately called, well it was by the waiter chap who sat us down. The Mal has a reputation of being a high class eatery, which is evident on how busy it gets, especially around the evening serving hours, which is both reassuring and irritating, reassuring for the quality of the food, must be good if plenty of people keep coming through the doors logic, and irritating because after all this time you would have thought they would have learnt how to handle such busy periods in both staffing and kitchen. There's someone fairly quick sharp to take your order, but the gap between the waiter leaving and coming back with your food is far too long, even for the most patient of patrons, and sending someone over to offer you wine wine and maybe some more wine just doesn't help matters. Once is endearing, twice is fair enough, thrice times, back off dude we don't want any. Starters finally arrive, they taste lovely, thinking the starters have been delayed whilst the mains are being cooked so there's minimal delay time between servings, wrong. More people are seated, more waiters fly by, more time crawls by, and still we wait. When the food does arrive it is gorgeous, but when I recall the price and cross compare to other food of this quality with price and taste, it isn't exceptional, and with the time delays again in relation to the reputation of Malmaison, I do start to get rather miffed at the whole experience. And when you call it pocket change short of £60 for soft drinks, two starters and two mains, it's an expensive ok experience. For quality and taste I've had better for less, and attention to detail by the staff has been more customer care oriented rather than lets get them hammered and hope they don't notice everything is late out of the kitchen. read more