Babel Beerhouse — Restaurant in London

Had our leaving-do here. Awful. We booked an area, were told there was a minimum spend of 150£ which is fine. The problem was: the guy did not come round to take orders so all our guests ordered and paid at the bar the first round. Already annoyed. Then, I have announced to the guests specifically to order from the guy from now onwards. I have also told the guy to add back the first round of orders so we make our minimum spend. He agreed so he went around and added their orders into the tab. These drinks have been paid for so the point was to make our minimum spend asap and not have the pressure and to avoid paying a sum towards the end. The problem was he does not distinguish what has been paid and what has not. Then he said he is confused and said those drinks in the tab were not paid for (which they were.). I then said to stop the tab (after reaching 150£) and after paying DOUBLE for those first round of drinks (which both we are to pay in the tab and the guests already paid at the bar). The tab was then NOT stopped, and it was continued until my husband finally paid at £293.45. I was furious but we were busy with guests and did not have the capacity to deal with this. The guy knew perfectly I wanted to make the minimum spend asap and to pay it at that. If he was not able to separate out the drinks at the first round then he should have made a separate note for those drinks to add to our overall minimum spend. And then when the minimum spend is reached we were not informed. Actually we were not informed either when the cost has been doubled - we found...

Booked my 30th outside. On the day, they were nice enough to let us have an area inside as it was raining a lot, told us there was no food and that we could order from takeaway platforms (the main reason I booked was because it seemed a good balance between drinks/food offer). That was fine, after a couple of hours we started seeing waiters carrying food around. One of my friends asked and they said that we needed to book food in advance (which I was never made aware of). We were told to move as another booking was coming (which is fair) so we went outside as it wasn't raining as much anymore, I asked the waiters about food and they said that we could indeed order and that the reason why food wasn't available before was because the kitchen wasn't working, but that it had been working for 3 hours. No one came to tell us that info which I found strange.

A few orders we placed through the app got lost and we waited hours for them. We had to walk up to them more than a couple of times to made them aware of the different orders we paid for but they never got in the system.

We stayed there until closing time and the cherry in top was when I forgot an expensive gift there. I called the next day hoping it'd be there but they couldn't find it. I can see how they tried to locate it but overall the experience wasn't great for different reasons and I am not sure I'd recommend it to anyone. Maybe it was bad...

Sadly a really disappointing experience. Arrived to our booking to be told that there was no draft beer available - understand that things happen but as we were told by the staff that this had been going on for days, it felt that a courtesy call to people with bookings would have been appreciated. We booked to come to a brewery bar to enjoy a range of beer and this issue could have been understood if we had been warned before making the trip to Kings Cross. To make matters worse, we waited 30 minutes for our drinks to come without any update from the staff. Hard to understand when most were just cans of beer from a fridge. When our drinks arrived we were just told that it was because there was only 1 member of staff on the bar (on a Friday night!) Again, some sort of communication on this when we ordered to set expectations would have been appreciated. Finally to top off the experience, on delivery of the other drinks, one member of our party who ordered a non alcoholic beer was told that they had ran out, and the only other options were soft drinks. No refund was offered. Again, disappointing for a beer establishment to only have 1 option and even more disappointing to be told after waiting 30 minutes for the drinks to arrive. Due to these 3 factors, we drank up and headed elsewhere to get better service and drinks selection - we will not be returning or...