In short: Great food, terrible service...
Good variety of dishes served - Greek, Italian and Spanish being the main influences. Love the fact you can see the kitchen and the kitchen staff were impeccably dressed and all seemed very happy, laughing and smiling whilst working is always good to see.
Good portion sizes but the prices are quite expensive. There are a lot of restaurants around Chorlton, especially tapas places so I would worry that Oilive & Thyme are pricing themselves out a bit. However, based on the food I would return, it's not really pricey by city centre standards.
So why the three star review? Long story, read on for more...
So I've been away for a while, it's my first weekend home and my first task is taking my heavily pregnant best friend out for dinner...the criteria was simple - somewhere local, somewhere we haven't been before and somewhere nice - hmmmm. After much debate, we decided on Olive & Thyme. My friend is one of those crazily fussy eaters (made worse by pregnancy) so a place that serves a lot of different types of food is a great place for us.
I was a little apprehensible when approaching, the restaurant looks pretty nondescript from the outside and when we opened the door, we saw that it was absolutely empty...on a Saturday night...not a good sign. But going anywhere else was going to be too much hassle so we bit the bullet and asked for a table of two. That's where we hit our first problem, the restaurant, was empty as previously mentioned and yet he sat us (a heavily pregnant woman) on a tiny little table in the middle of the restaurant. It was tiny. And uncomfortable. Made more uncomfortable by the fact that he then sat a table of 8 loud party goers on a table five inches from ours as soon as we had ordered. We could not hear a word that each other were saying. We asked to move but were told that the other tables were booked. We decided to just get our meal over and get out of there.
Which was a huge shame because the food was wonderful, I had the grilled halloumi and the Mediterranean king prawns which were really good, the risotto was lovely and the portion sizes were plentiful. My friend had meatballs and the chicken shish kebab, both of which she ate all of and enjoyed (unheard of).
I would go back to give it another try, I'd love to give a better review so maybe you'll see an update appearing here soon. read more