Brasserie Joël — Restaurant in London

We visited Brasserie Joel for dinner whilst we were staying at the Park Plaza mid week. We are not tourists in London and we know the area quite well, and we're also fans of french cooking so it seemed like a good idea.

From the outside, the restaurant gave me quite high hopes, but didn't live up to the style and prices it has given itself. Once inside, the atmosphere reminded me of a canteen as it was very, very noisy and has little/no soft furnishings. There were quite a few families in there with children playing cards and electronic games on their phones. The tables are squeezed together so it's hard to escape the noise.

We had to wait quite a while to be seated as their front of house staff had disappeared somewhere. We also had to wait quite a while to get served, and again for our food to arrive, however our waitress was very pleasant.

The thing that inspired me to write this review was their french onion soup (if you can call it that). This is a classic french dish and is so, so easy to cook. However this soup was DREADFUL. It was like water. No exaggeration. Water with a sopping soggy layer of cheapo white bread. I don't think it had even been seasoned. I wondered if once it had been a real onion soup but had been watered down so many times it was now the homeopathic version of onion soup. I just don't know how you can get onion soup that wrong. I've had better french onion soup in a motorway service station and didn't cost £15 for two portions. What a joke.

We were so disappointed that we looked for our waitress so we could send it back, but she had disappeared again. We waited and waited, and in the end we were just too hungry and tired to deal with the fuss, and having to wait ages for a replacement, so we just sucked it up, added loads of salt and ate it.

The rest of the food was okay, the boeuf bourguignon was good, but as a Londoner who eats out a lot in central London I'd say it was definitely overpriced for what it was. You can find a lot tastier food in a much better setting at the same price as this.

Watch our for their "bottled water". It's £3 for a fancy glass bottle (but you can pick up a bottle for free at breakfast) and it's bottled on the premises, which means it's just really expensive...

We booked this restaurant for our New Years Eve dinner. Our final night in London. Let me start with the positives - the appetizer (salmon) had taste and the drinks were OK. The ambience was soothing. The second course which consisted of crab ravioli was disappointing. The pasta was chewy, not al dente but rather plastic in consistency. The sauce had some merit but was underwhelming overall. My main course was venison, as noted in the pre fixe menu. I believe calling it poorly cooked London broil with a sauce that was reminiscient of a cheaply crafted 1980s balsamic reduction and the smallest mushrooms on earth would be a more accurate way to describe this disater. The dessert was edible (some dated mousse dish). I have paid much more for a meal and certainly much less, but I have never witnessed a larger discrepancy between the quality of a dinner versus the price tag. This meal came to nearly $600 in U.S. currency (for two adults and my 16-year old daughter). Eating food that is awful is never pleasant but it is slightly easier to swallow and digest when it does not cost the same as purchasing three quality theater tickets in the west end. Bit of advice for Brasserie Joel - while doing a pre fixe menu for NYE makes perfect sense and charging those prices is expected - you may want to prepare dishes that show you actually can cook. You also may want to consider creating a wonderful culinary experience for your patrons that they can cherish for...

It is a part of a rather good hotel which is the park plaza and with that they have knowledgeable, conversational and mannered staff. My experience has been very well here, and they treated me and my family with respect I have got to be honest and say that their food was a mix. The starter of opinion soup was decent, but it was not as I would expect with the consistency of the cheese and lack of onions. Their steak was honestly so tasty! It was marinated well as each bite just was so refreshing. However, my main looked a tacky with around 8 French fries stacked up and some salat leaves. Just for the price it cost it felt as though it should have been something different earner than those two things. Like for example potatoes au gratin instead of French fries would have made it so much better looking and a lot tastier. The dessert was tasty too and it did not take to long to prepare all these meals, but we stayed there for a while just enjoying the atmosphere.

The second day for their breakfast (like a continental breakfast) it was not really to my liking as the food just felt a dry and sloppy. This criticism should be taken with a grain of salt as I caught the later end of their service. I did not end up eating up the two slices of bread I got with eggs, bacon, and sausages. There was a good variety of food here for breakfast which is...