Bloomsbury Street Kitchen — Restaurant in London

STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE

I dined here for a friends birthday and left feeling utterly deflated, annoyed and quite frankly, still hungry.

The initial time to take our order was very long, although the server was prompt in dropping off and explaining the menu. We ordered drinks first and waited a long time for these to arrive. Then, after waiting around 20 minutes after our drinks had been on the table we finally were able to order.

Now, my preface here that we were not told dishes come as and when they are ready, no one explained this or apologised once service began which started to leave a very unpleasant taste about the whole dining journey.

The whole dining experience was almost 3 hours for us to have 7 small plates, a round of cocktails and a bottle wine. I find this simply unacceptable. The dishes started very, very slowly coming to the table and when the first came out we wondered if this was just because it was a salad and that the rest would all hit the table on the next course. We were sadly mistaken. Dishes started to come out with no explanation on why or even whether there was a delay to service. We could see tables around us receiving dishes all together and we had hoped that our table would follow suit. It did not.

One of our dishes was sent to the table and the runner knocked a wine glass into it. This is fine as things happen but we then had to wait another 20 minutes for the dish to be sent back out. No one came over to apologise or to give us an accurate or updated time for when the dish or even the rest of the food would be out.

We became restless waiting after the first morsel of food was dropped and tried to find our server to order some wine which proved to be a challenge. When we eventually did find our server she served us wine and then put it in a wine bucket far from us so we could not even serve ourself more wine. Finding the server to ask for a top up also proved to be difficult. We would have happily ordered more wine or cocktails if we could have found an attentive server, sadly, this was very much not the case.

The whole experience was terrible and what made things worse is when asking for the bill a manager came to drop off the bill. We started paying to be told it was not our bill, we did not fully check the bill as we wanted to get out as soon as possible after a long, slow and poor service. We did get a sorry from our server or the manager who gave us the incorrect bill, just a 'tap the card here for a refund'. I work in hospitality and now how long same day refunds can take so we were not prepared to be asked to pay twice due their negligence our the error of the manager for not knowing the floor plan or tables numbers.

After another 10 minutes of them trying to fix the bill they finally dropped the correct bill with the payments transferred, by which time a member of our party had to leave to get her last train because the service took so long. I then asked for service to be removed due to the poor experience and lack of service we had received. The server then simply grabbed the old bill with service on, came back with the removed service bill and threw it on the table. this really topped the night off and ruined what was supposed to be a fun night out for my friends birthday.

I look forward to hearing from management and would appreciate an email contact so that this can be...

Celebrated a recent engagement with a table of 7 on Friday 3rd March. The food here is great - I can’t fault that. However, the service was shocking. I’m not sure if they were understaffed or what the problem was, but the whole service team looked like they hated being there. I appreciate they were busy (that was an excuse given) - but being a central London restaurant on a Friday night, you expect it and prepare and manage it in the best way you can. Be transparent that you’re understaffed, make it light-hearted, stop frowning whenever we ask for a menu or some more drinks like we’ve said something ridiculous, be slightly apologetic when things take longer or go wrong or you make a mistake… unfortunately, there was just no care or consideration taken at all. The serving staff took out frustrations on the customers. I was looking around and it was chaos! No staff assigned to specific tables with everyone trying so hard to get attention from the service staff - one waiter even said “I don’t know what you ordered. I don’t know what my other colleagues did”. As I said the food is great here - but don’t come when it’s busy. 40 minutes late sitting us down for our booking, no drinks orders taken at the bar or at the table when we were sat down, 3 attempts to get all our drinks served, 5+ attempts to get food menus and dessert menus and just a lot of unnecessary hostility. When you go out for a meal, you just don’t expect to have to spend so much effort with every single interaction. Unfortunately the Bloomsbury Street Kitchen failed this time.

(Sorry some of the photos of the food are dark - the light above our table broke halfway...

Wow! Wow! Wow! I thought it would be good but it exceeded even those expectations. It had been ages since a central London restaurant got me excited like this again.

Quick overview: small plates, delicious food, you pay for the quality, won’t be disappointed.

Between us (one meat, one vegetarian), knowing they were sharing tapas style plates, we decided to order 4 plates between us. They said it will come out when ready but still served it like starters and mains. We ordered:

STARTERS

Patatas Bravas (V) 10/10

Ahhhh there were bang bang!!! I wasn’t expecting much but when they turned up they looked as amazing as they tasted.Thin, long, crispy and salty with a great aioli dip.

Filo Prawns 8/10

Saw the people next to me have these and had to ask which ones they were on the menu. Again, they looked as delicious as they tasted. Never had prawns in this style aside from tempura but this was like a thin crispy pastry wrapping. It tasted amazing and had a great crunch.

MAINS:

Roasted Aubergine 8/10

We were in two minds about ordering this or the gnocchi but really glad we tried this. Turned up looking well presented. Good texture and nice glaze.

Black Pepper Vegetarian Chicken 9/10

Really tasty and loved the peppery flavour. The mock meat used was a great consistency as well - not too chewy.

We did expect these two plates to be slightly larger portion sizes than they were (especially after seeing the pasta portion sizes and the prices).

Overall a really great meal and a super nice ambience too! Would...