Bread Street Kitchen & Bar - Southwark — Restaurant in London

First off, let me start with saying this is a long one, but it’s worth the read.

I made reservations a week ago while I was back in the states for a well-known restaurant in London for beef Wellington. I decided to change that reservation to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. My daughters have been watching his show on Fox back at home and saw this place near our hotel. I saw that this restaurant also had beef Wellington just like his Las Vegas location. I’ve had that dish in Las Vegas over the past year and the service and the food was top notch.

The same definitely couldn’t be said for this restaurant.

Walking into the door, knowing that this dish takes 45 minutes to cook according to the menu, we placed the order as soon as we sat down for my wife and I to share.

We ordered drinks and after they were placed about 5 to 10 minutes later the waitress came out and told us that they were missing one key ingredient for beef Wellington tonight. That definitely seems like something that should’ve been discussed before dinner service started considering that this is 105£ dish.

Just a quick sidenote, have you ever seen one of Gordon Ramsay’s shows? A quick search on YouTube will show you several two minute highlights of him hollering at incompetent restaurants and restaurant owners and their work staff.

We ordered normal dishes and moved on from this Wellington issue since it’s too late to change venues. The wife ordered fish and chips which turned out not too bad and my two daughters meals were OK at best . I can’t say the same for my $39 sirloin steak.

To my fellow Americans, you will understand this because this was not as good as a $12 Applebee’s steak. I truly think most of us could cook something better at home. It was super thin and severely over salted.

Our food came out fairly fast but they was due to the fact that there was only two other families in the entire establishment at 6:30 on a Saturday night. Should have been my warning sign. I quickly ordered some red to wine accompany my salty steak. That wine never came to our table and I assumed they forgot about it.

When I finally asked the waitress to close our bill, she told me that they had a hard time finding that wine and asked me if I wanted anything else. I laughed and said that we’re done eating just go ahead and close the tab out.

I can’t stress enough how terrible the experience was tonight. This is the type of restaurant and experience that the old Gordon Ramsay would have torn apart. The new new softer on people but more wrinkled version of Gordon on American tv is the one that keeps putting his name on restaurants like this to collect another dollar

Do not spend your money at this place because it will be closed soon. I will watch closely and monitor online feeling fully confident this won’t see the end of 2024. This will be a blessing to the workers that aren’t making money along with the customers that deal with this disappointment...

Shocked and Disappointed! I have watched many episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant programme on TV over the years. Leaving the drama and the razzmatazz aside, his diagnosis and remedy for those failing restaurants was spot on. I happen to live nearby one of his restaurant’s in Southwark and given his fame and immense power in the hospitality industry, I have always had a high regard for this place, but never had the opportunity to try it out until this Christmas eve. What we encountered in this our first visit is simply very shocking and disappointing. We could not understand, how he managed to find the time, the moral, and even the rationale to fix other people’s problems by crossing the continent while his own flagship restaurant is such a mediocre.

We booked a table for three for dinner and when we arrived, we were given a friendly reception by the host, and we were even seated in the nicest part of the restaurant, for which we were very grateful for. What first caught our attention was the overpowering fish smell, which gave the impression that the restaurant’s speciality is fish-based dishes. But we found out that they had quite a diverse menu which was interesting. The service was over all reasonable, but not outstanding, and we did not see anything different from any other average restaurant. We ordered beef burgers and a bowl of poke salad. The presentation of the food over all was reasonable, however, when we actually tasted the burgers, we were shocked and stunned in disbelief. The burgers were blunt and tasteless, in fact some of us could not even finish them. The partially burnt fries were below average. We have had great burgers and fries even in ordinary market stalls for a quarter of the prices than what we had paid at the Gordon’s place.

The Poke Bowl, although well presented, the green salad in the bowl was not fresh, in fact it had gone off. We have pointed out to the waiter but did not say anything other than collecting the plates and disappeared. The irony in all of this is that while Gordon presents himself as the master fixer, why has he allowed his own restaurant, brandishing his own photo with pride, to not live up to the standard he himself set for others. I know, he might not have the time to read this and other critical reviews, but I believe that his customers have the right to get excellent food with great service for the exorbitant price they charged...

I did not want to write a review at first, because the restaurant kind of fixed their mistake, but now they pissed me off.

We went for dinner with friends and first they forgot about us. The waitress gets our order and we are waiting for our food. After about 30 min she comes and apologizes that the kitchen lost our order (?) and she will take it again. I have worked in restaurants myself, so I understand that this happens so I was not very upset - things happen and we thought that now they will probably put us first and the food will arrive soon.

40 min later (!!) the food arrives. My Ceasar salad is without chicken that the waitress asked if I wanted and I said yes, but ok. My son (9 years) ordered steak and also one of the grown ups ordered steak. Both steaks arrive, but my son’s steak has half of the fries that the my grown up friend has. I thought that maybe that is kids portion and it will be cheaper - no, in the bill the same price. Why does my son get smaller portion for the same price? I order steak and it is not for the restaurant staff to decide how much he will eat.

After all this mess they give us discount, apologize and take the service charge away so I decided ok, that’s fair.

But we come home and my partner realizes that he does not have his headphones and his bag fell in the restaurant so they might be there. I call the restaurant, but they are closed, so I send an email. Website says that the email is checked from 11am, so I wait and at 12.30 still no response. I call again and a unkind person informs me that they cannot help me and I have to send an email. I say I did, but they are not replying and we have a plane to catch in couple of hours (I live in Spain) so I am in a rush. Nothing they can do, I should go back to the restaurant. Really - it’s London, I obviously am not close and it will take me 3 hours to get there and come back, really you can’t contact the restaurant? Maybe the headphones are not even there.

The contact e-mail and phone number in the website is shown for the specific restaurant (has the restaurant name in the email address), but aparently it is not because it goes to the central office.

I am so pissed about how unhelpful the staff was and would never go back. The restaurant probably won’t care, because I am just a small client and not a rich one, but maybe this review helps someone else. It is not all about the food (which was not bad,...