I found this restaurant perplexing. It seems to want to be a high-end dining experience, and it's priced accordingly, but I found it mediocre and slightly odd.
I ate here about 10 times in February 2013 while staying at the Sofitel. (I kept going back because I was busy and it was convenient, and because the food itself was not terrible.)
The good:
* The food was fine. Not great, but perfectly fine.
The mixed or neutral:
* "Interactive dining experience," LOLOL.
* I saw the same staff people many times, and yet they always greeted me and asked for my room number as though we'd never seen each other before. I don't want them to be my best friend, but it did start to feel a little Groundhog Day.
* Things I ordered repeatedly were often made differently for no obvious reason. Cappuccino would come with/without chocolate. Bread would come one day in thin slices and the next in large chunks. A noodle dish would have bean sprouts and red pepper sometimes, and sometimes not.
* Pepper grinder was crap: weak and didn't put out much pepper. I only mention that because in my experience a good restaurant takes pepper seriously.
* I often order two appetizers (one as an app, one as a main). When I did that at Thyme, until I learned to ask them not to, they would bring out both simultaneously.
The bad:
* Some of the serving staff do not speak very good English. (Couldn't explain menu items or understand requests.)
* Twice I ordered classic, ordinary, simple cocktails and the staff got totally confused. And, before-dinner drinks were regularly served 10 or 15 minutes after the food arrived.
* The servers consistently abandoned me throughout my meal, delivering the food and then returning, much later, with the bill. Weirdly, nobody ever asked me if I wanted coffee or dessert.
* The buffet (which I never ordered) looked tired: a pretty ordinary mix of cold meats and cheeses and seafood, with a few hot Indian dishes. An array of mustards was crusted-over in a way that was kind of confidence-diminishing.
* The entire menu was laughably over-priced. The dinner buffet is $79/pp. An egg white omelette is $35, soup is $19, salad $29, steak $55. That might make sense if the experience were really good, but it is middle-of-the-road hotel food with worse-than-average service.
Upshot: I found my Thyme experiences somewhat surreal. If the prices had been cut in half the whole thing would've made sense and I would've been happy. But the gap between what Thyme thinks it is (awesome) and what it really is (mediocre) is just bizarre. read more