Giggling Squid - Kingston upon Thames — Restaurant in London

Gave two of our party food poisoning and have made little to no attempt to help after repeated emails about the issue. I was waiting to leave a review after being helped by customer service but I have just received an email simply saying this “All cases such as this is dealt with externally after we pass on all relevant info. I do apologise about the wait, but it is out of our hand at this point” It has been two weeks.

Our party of four celebrated my friend’s birthday at your restaurant. My friend who had her birthday and I have been very ill from our meal. Here’s a description of our experience:

We had a bottle of rose wine, a margarita and two Samui Colada which took about 20/30 minutes to arrive where the starters came out first, apparently the system didn’t send it through. There was a little apology and no offer of compensation for our wait.

Our starters consisted of prawn crackers, chicken satay, salt & pepper squid and duck spring rolls which the four of us shared. All were very tasty. For dessert we had trio of dessert, a couple scoops of ice cream, caramelised mango cake and my friend had a melting heart chocolate dessert with an extra scoop of sesame ice cream with happy birthday written on it. Which was excellent and we are very grateful for the extra effort for her birthday, and made up for the drink wait.

I think the problem was likely our mains however; both my friend and I had the sticky chicken. I had never been to Giggling Squid before and had thought it tasted burnt but not unbearable, my friend who has had it before said it didn’t usually taste like this and it was definitely burnt. Having waited and managed restaurants previously, I hate to complain so just ate it, which I now very much regret. Both my friend and I woke at around 2:30am and spent an incredibly painful half an hour on the toilet. As my friend had the exact same experience at the exact same time, there is no doubt that it was either the cocktail or more likely the sticky chicken. To make things worse my friend had to spend the following day travelling to Scotland for a holiday and suffered for a few days where she couldn’t eat, still frequenting the toilet.

Our bill came to £200.35 and at this price we don’t expect to be poisoned.

So not only was the night of my friend’s birthday ruined, but now the first few days of her holiday were ruined. We are very unhappy with the inconvenience of being iIll and there is no doubt that the issues stemmed from your food, as we met and parted at your restaurant.

I hope someone will get back to me to refund the food at least, for our inconvenience and for the danger...

Disappointing to be leaving this review as we love GS. We never complain however we booked a special meal for Valentine’s Day and payed a lot of money for food which was not up to standard and didn’t taste nice at all. We were really looking forward to this meal all week and regretted going in the end.

For our main we ordered pad kee mao, sticky chicken and jasmine rice. We were surprised when our food came out in less than 10 mins of us ordering. We hadn’t even finished our Thai cracker starter. The sticky chicken was soggy, stodgy, dry and tasted of corn starch; it was not crispy or sweet and sour like the menu said. You can see the difference of the chicken we had vs the picture online. The jasmine rice was dry and stodgy and clumped together like sticky rice. We didn’t finish these dishes as it was pretty disgusting. We suspected the food had been cooked earlier and left out, due to the condition it was in and how quickly it came out. Lastly the pad kee mao was flavourless compared to ones we’ve had in other GS branches.

At the end of our meal, when the waitress asked if we enjoyed our meal, we decided to answer truthfully. Her response was “oh I’m sorry to hear that, would you like to look at the dessert menu” in a sarcastic tone … why bother asking if you’re going to completely ignore a customer complaint. We asked for the service charge to be removed from the bill when it came and explained again that we wasn’t happy with our meal. The waitress ignored our second complaint and removed the service charge. Our feedback was not relayed back to the manager. There was no gesture of goodwill and we had to pay for food despite the fact we’d left most of it on the plate.

Definitely won’t be returning to this particular GS again.

Edit: After visiting another GS branch this weekend to use our “goodwill” voucher, we found out on paying that the balance was zero… not sure if this was deliberate or the same voucher code had been shared with multiple people as the manager of the store told us the voucher had supposedly been redeemed just 2 days after our Valentines meal. We explained we hadn’t used the voucher and she was luckily able...

We went to Giggling Squid in Kingston on the evening of Thursday 27 September and we were prepared to love it; we really need more good food in Kingston. The standard of food locally frequently falls way below London or even Brighton standards witb restauarnts and pubs relying heavily on pre-prepared or semi-prepared /brought-in food or food being kept heated for so long that it has kind of died a second death by the time it is served. We felt very sorry for the staff at the restaurat. They were all very nice and polite but clearly inexperienced; certainly very little training had been given prior to the restaurant opening. The poor girl who greeted us couldn't even use the booking system by her own admission and was unable to find our booking. The seafood was all over-cooked and rubbery sadly. The beer was luke-warm. Not what you expect at a restaurant where some of the main courses hit the £17 mark (which is a lot for Kingston). They kindly replaced our beer. As we watched the staff I was amazed to see that they most of the time came out of the kitchen looking confused and seemed totally unable to understand what they should do. I felt very sorry for them. There was a much odler woman there, a supervisor perhaps, of Asian descent, who seemed to do nothing more than remove plates, replenish drinks and rearrange cutlery. Nobody was mentoring the staff. There was no direction at all and service was very sloppy. As I said the staff were lovely and although I said I didn't want money off they gave us dessert gratis which was very kind of them BUT what we would really like to see is the food and staff on point so that we can return to eat the fish and seafood we love so much. Please sort it out,...