Chez Antoinette Covent Garden — Restaurant in London

We decided to try Chez Antoinette today for lunch; it proved to be an awful decision and an incredibly bad experience.

We arrived to a small queue and were told we would need to wait around 20 minutes for a table among a group of people. After around 15 minutes, the waitress reappeared and asked the queuing groups to form a line in the order that we had arrived so that she knew who to sit first. We waited another 20 minutes, eventually reaching the front of the queue with nobody left behind us. At this point, a table of two got up and left so we anticipated that we would be seated shortly. The table was cleared and the waitress approached us. At the same time, a group of three walked into the line and to our horror, the waitress walked directly over to them and showed them to the vacated table, despite the fact that they had just arrived and we had waited patiently for over half an hour. Noticing our astonished looks, the waitress said to us "sorry guys, tables of three have priority and need to sit first".

I was absolutely disgusted at the complete disregard shown to us. I told the waitress that we had waited for a considerable amount of time to be sat and her pithy response was simply "shall I get the manager?" A course of action that very clearly wouldn't have seen us be able to eat lunch any quicker. If this was the policy, why on earth did she not warn us of this when we arrived so that we could make an informed decision about whether to queue or try elsewhere?

Chez Antoinette shouldn't be considered a restaurant in the traditional sense of providing food and drink to customers, more so a money making exercise where tables are sat according to a loose algorithm around who might spend the most amount of money the fastest.

I love French food and there are several fantastic bistros in central London these days. Sadly Chez Antoinette is about as far from this as one can possibly get. Poorly trained and abrupt staff seemingly go out of their way to make you feel unwelcome, giving the place the distinct feel of a generic tourist trap you might have the misfortune to visit down a side street of the Champs Elysées.

I don't enjoy and very seldom write negative reviews of restaurants but Chez Antoinette provided the one of the worst experiences of my ten years living in London. I cannot advise you in strong enough terms to avoid this place and find somewhere...

Absolutely horrible and disappointing service when we went, waste of time!

We visited on a Wednesday morning a while ago to grab breakfast, some time around 10:30, we were seated outside and given breakfast menus. The waitress came to take our drinks 20 minutes later, then we waited for her to come and take our meal order. She didn’t. She continued to serve other tables that weren’t us, to the point one table who was seated after us ended up getting their drinks and food order and finished (!) before we had even been able to order. When we were finally able to call over the waitress (who just absolutely would not make eye contact with us or check on us at all), we had been waiting so long (over an hour after arriving) that she told us we couldn’t order breakfast anymore, took our menus and gave us a lunch menu.

We proceeded to ask for the bill and leave, because who knows how long we might have had to wait to actually order and receive a meal here?

Incredibly disappointing, especially as my partner is French and had been excited to take me here (and we had stopped off on our anniversary). This did happen a while ago, but it has stuck in my mind and I couldn’t help but leave a review.

I’m sure if we’d been able to try the food and had a different waitress perhaps our view of this place would be different, but unfortunately we don’t have anything...

We came here to grab something light before we headed out for a long journey. When we were about to go in, we couldn't really see a menu outside since we were unsure what to get. We were confused and walked in. Moments later a male waitress was rushing to us and greeted us quite loudly with "HELLO" multiple times. My friend asked if we could be seated but I felt like the waiter should've asked if we wanted to be seated. I wanted to purchase a granola without a drink since me and my friend wouldn't know where the next set of toilets would be during our journey. We had to travel to 3 places very quickly to meet up with people and drop stuff off, I believe it was St Paul's, Ealing Broadway then Wembley. I thought it was risky to drink a hot drink or anything. I was willing to pay the same cost for the granola and drink but I just didn't want the drink. It would be a waste if I ordered it and didn't drink it so I just didn't want to be served it. The waitress replied that I have to get the drink with the granola. So I ended up not eating and my friend got a brioche. I was so hungry I ended up going to another place to eat. I liked the atmosphere and my friend enjoyed the brioche. Perhaps there was some miscommunication but my experience was not...