Overpriced, loud, pretentious, rubbish.
This pretentious restaurant is one of the worst eats I've had in London in a long time, whilst shouting across the table.
Front of house is really lacking, you enter into a semi-workshop, semi-restaurant office space. If you're lucky enough to be greeted and lead to a table you're told to 'await the experience'. The basement restaurant is dark, loud with a standard steakhouse decor. I was lead to my friends, and it was immediately clear service was going to be terrible. However, the worst was just how loud the restaurant was. Between four of us, we had to shout across the table, and half way through the night I lost my voice and another person just gave up trying to listen in. When our drinks order was finally taken, we were told that the restaurant was all about 'sharing': the food was to be 'shared' and it's a very 'new experience for London'. How is sharing of food a new idea?
We were coerced into ordering more starters than we wanted, partly because it was so loud it was hard to make yourself heard, which was frustrating as this really added to our final bill. Starters are tacos, and highly recommended is the 'beef fat' taco. Be warned this is a mix of beef and lamb fat, and I'll say this was the only decent thing I tasted, mostly because I like lamb fat. We then waited a really long time between starters and mains. Mains is several hundred grams of meat lobbed on a flat bread - every dish, as far as we could tell, was served on a bit of flatbread. Why? Nothing special, nothing going on with the meat, no effort in terms of marinade and just a basic flat bread. Now imagine trying to 'share' this flat bread meat dish...as you only get one flat bread. Not what I call sharing...The beef was a cheap cut of meat you'd use for stew and the lamb....well the lamb tasted of mackerel. Yes they have fish on the menu and must share cooking areas so your meat tastes like fish and vice versa. Food was served cold, so our side of corn with a knob of butter had not melted...at this stage you can understand we're trying to make a quick getaway. Our overbearing waiter seemed quite upset I'd left my plate of fishy meat and then even more peeved we didn't want more drinks and deserts. Although friendly, a true salesman, pushy and really trying to up the final amount of the bill...and wow the bill! I don't see how this has such high ratings, as there is really nothing special and for a meat heavy restaurant the quality of the meat and the cooking of the meat is not acceptable. read more