El Pastor Soho — Restaurant in London

Terrible experience at El Pastor in Soho and definitely do no use for late night dinner bookings.

The restaurant allows dinner bookings till 11pm and is open till 1am for drinking. I made a post theatre "dinner" booking for 5 people at 10.45pm on a Saturday and, 15 mins before my booking, I received a text from the restaurant informing me that the kitchen would close before I arrived. I rang the restaurant to be told they were very sorry for the "inconvenience" but we would not be allowed to have dinner and, what's worse, this was what happened every night!

Leaving the rest of the group behind, I ran up to the restaurant and got there at 10.43 to be told by the manager there was nothing he could do. After a lot of back and forth I managed to convince the manager to allow me to place one quick order for the group who were about to arrive. While he was sorting this out with the kitchen, the staff running the front door explained to me that this happens all the time and though they have made complaints to senior management about the reservation policy, the management team have still done nothing about it.

We were finally shown into the busy downstairs bar/dining room and the food came within minutes of us being seated, which is not a complaint in and of itself but it had clearly been rushed and was (I would hope) not up to the usual standard. When we left the party was in full swing, and while I would never actively seek out any kind of compensation for negative experiences in restaurants, I still think it's worth mentioning we didn't receive any.

I don't want to be "that guy", and yes, I'm very aware that even by uttering that sentence I've already condemned myself, but I've worked in restaurants for over 20 years both back and front of house and I've never had an experience quite like this; where the the kitchen closes 30 mins before the last dinner booking and the staff beg you to write a review because the people above them don't seem to care that it happens every week. I don't ever write reviews but since all the staff I spoke to asked me several times to write this one I thought it worth doing. Obviously it's a really easy fix, STOP TAKING DINNER BOOKINGS AFTER YOU KITCHEN HAS CLOSED! Or, if that's too taxing, perhaps text the dinners to tell them that "you won't be allowing them to dine" slightly earlier than 15 mins before their booking.

I think it's also worth noting 2 things:

1, All the staff were very embarrassed about the situation and extremely kind and polite to us.

2, El Pastor has set their reservation system (Resy) to not send out a post reservation review email (the default setting). This means diners are unable to communicate directly with the restaurant about a negative experience such as above, which is why this review is posted publicly here instead.

I just find astonishing given El Pastor is part of the Hart Group, which run by the restaurateurs behind such fantastic establishments as Barrafina and Quo Vadis. Hopefully they'll fix this annoyingly easy...

This place serves tasty, creative and well executed Mexican food. The cocktail menu is inventive and enjoyable. However sadly they do not offer pitchers of Margarita; which they are missing a big trick on in my opinion. The tacos are great, but some of the menu options are insanely expensive for a Mexican restaurant and not worth it when you can spend the same money for better food elsewhere.

Sadly our appetite for dessert was spoiled after a waiter publicly, and very loudly, declared we had to leave the restaurant as we had been at the table for two hours and other people had been double booked on the same table (as if this was our problem, not management’s problem?!)

This seemed incredulous to us, as there were clearly other spare tables available in the restaurant, plus we had spent over £360 between four people on multiple drinks and most items on the menu.

We were more than happy to keep eating and drinking over a few hours at a leisurely pace, yet the waiter continued to loudly and publicly berate us, telling us the restaurant had a two hour booking policy - which none of us had been made aware of! (If we had known this was their idiotic policy, we would never have eaten at El Pastor, as who wants to have a relaxed Saturday brunch and be turfed out within two hours and a few hundred pounds later?)

The phrase “know your audience” was key here as the rudeness of the staff at customers clearly spending a lot of money and enjoying themselves ruined the entire experience. Which is a great shame as we would have happily stayed even longer and ordered more food and drink.

So the search for a better Mexican restaurant...

Tasty food but let down by value for money and slow service.

Had dinner on a Thursday night - a friend had booked a table well in advance and requested it be upstairs (due to the downstairs DJ being rather loud and having a couple of older people in our party hard of hearing). Arrived to find table was downstairs having not been told this prior to arriving. After asking to move upstairs we eventually did about 30-40minutes later but lacking in apologies! Had the sea bream sharing plate - which was delicous and enough for 2 people. Very tasty and fresh although the 'lime slaw' didn't seem to have much lime in - (a shame as the acidity would have improved the fish greatly). Others in our party orders some cocktails which seemed tasty and appealing - drinks menu is pretty good. Ordered 2 desserts for 2 people - the pineapple with granita and the Corn cake. Both were very small for the prices but the corn cake was at least tasty. The pineapple with granita was tiny and lacking in flavour. A token amount of (melted) granita was dotted on the pineapple, no fresh mint as per the menu and zero chilli kick as per the menu. For £7 for about 7 bite size pieces of pineapple feels like a joke. After commenting on this when our plates were cleared the person serving us did agree with me and kindly removed it from the bill. Service was slow throughout the meal and our main course plates were left on the table uncleared for at least 20minutes and we had to ask several times for dessert menu's, to order dessert, and the bill. Worth it if you like mexican food but unfortunately I won't be...