Halepi — Restaurant in London

We went to the restaurant for my wife’s birthday after seeing an influencer’s review on instagram but we had a terrible experience. This was very sad as it was our first day out after a brutal 5 months in new baby world.

Due to travel disruption on the tube we were late for our booking by 30 mins but let the restaurant know and they were fine with it. When we arrived they said they would require the table back in 1hr 15 mins, not ideal but we thought would be ok. However, it took 20 mins for someone to come and take our order for drinks, so we ordered food at the same time.

The bread and dips arrived pretty quickly and were nice but as we were finishing off eating our starter (~40 minutes in) they said we were being too slow and had to move us to a different table in the restaurant.

I’ve never experienced that before! They move us right into the corner and I don’t think it was really even supposed to be a table. We were by the wines, paperwork and about a million electrical points and extension leads, it was actually quite an impressive amount of cabling tbf. If we needed the toilet we had to physically move the table to get out!

Our mains were served at this point and while eating them the staff were constantly reaching over us to get the card machine, which was housed where we were eating. There was quite a lot of arguments going on between the staff, which made for good entertaimment while piling in our food under constant time pressure. One of the waitors was really rude and kept taking stuff away even though hadn’t finished eating it.

We finished the meal in about 15 minutes due to this rush and were out of the restaurant just over 1hr after we’d begun. The food was also pretty average, good flavours but the chicken kebab was overcooked.

Horrendous experience overall, don’t go here. It’s well overpriced and some of the staff don’t really want you to be there. You seem like an...

My money was not good enough to eat here. My husband and I stopped by after a day of exploring for dinner. We waited by the door for 10 minutes before someone decided to approach us. That whole time, we just stood there like two big Barneys looking at each other and the server.

When we we finally greeted, we were told that there was a private event and that there was no space for us. Understandable if that was the case. They had a large party that was celebrating a birthday and a few couples scatter on different tables but not a private event. Plus there were 4 empty tables to which we assumed reservations since it was ‘a private event’ We said no problem and wouldn’t mind placing an order for take out. They said, ‘ we don’t do that in person. You can call and place and order.’ As he proceeds to hand me a business card.

So we left on our 1 minute walk to our stay and I called them. And called them, and called them and called them for 15 minutes and no one picked up. Mind you, the walk to the restaurant is 1 minute away. So after 20 minutes, I walked back to the restaurant and the place was empty. As in the big group for “private event” was gone and 3 tables of couples were left.

I proceeded to ask to place an order for take out and was told I had to call. I explain I’ve been trying for 15 minutes and when the man picked up his phone, they have the phone off the receiver so it wasn’t even gonna ring. At this point, the man let me place my order and I said I’d be back in 20 minutes.

I returned 20 min later for our food. Basically unseasoned food that was extremely oily. We ended up throwing the food and our money away and ordered from another place. The two starts for food cause their salad was alright.

Save your money and the feeling of being unwanted if you’re a reason of...

After much hype on social media, we went and had dinner for the first time at Halepi last night.

The decor was tired and needed some TLC, and the service was not great from the start, but I put that down to how busy the restaurant was and we proceeded to order our food.

To start we ordered a tomato and feta salad, a calamari, an avgolemono soup, taramasalata, tsaziki and two cokes. These were ok other than the soup which was tasteless.

For our mains my wife ordered 4 jumbo prawns (£10 per prawn) with chips and i had a mixed souvlaki with 2 skewers of chicken and 1 skewer of pork. The prawns were slimey and tasteless, my wife left more than half of her prawns on the plate. The chicken souvlaki was dry and lacked any other flavour than the charcoal it was cooked over. The pork souvlaki had some over cooked pieces and other pieces were undercooked. We did also try to order re mullet but we're told it had been taken off the menu this evening. A lovely couple seated next to us then explained that they had in fact just had red mullet moments before and had returned it to the kitchen as it had an odd bitter taste and as a result that is why the red mullet had been taken off of the menu.

We finished off with a cup of mint tea and English breakfast tea got the bill and left.

The bill was £165 for the items I mentioned above which in my opinion regardless of whether the food was good or not, is expensive and not worth the money.

The sad thing is, Halepi has been there since the 1960s when my family were all settled locally in the west end. My grandmother and my father used to eat there frequently. Sadly, it did not live up to its illustrious history and we will not be returning for...