Platform Shoreditch — Restaurant in London

TLDR: This is a review based on our groups interactions with Platform on 12/03/22.

RUBBISH booking system, if you can even call it “booking” system, it is an “enquiry” system, you have been warned!

SASSY and SARCASTIC customer service, with MISOGYNISTIC behaviour to my female friend. Unacceptable, when you take into consideration the same person may have to deal with individuals with hidden disabilities!

Booking experience: You go on their website to select a slot for your “booking”. You then receive an email titled “booking enquiry received”, my friend who did the booking was under the assumption this is now booked, but in the 2nd paragraph of the email it says the booking is not confirmed and that this is only an enquiry and the team will be in touch soon. The booking was done late night on their website for 15:30 the following day. The following afternoon around 12:15, my friend received an email stating the booking was “cancelled” (this implies the booking was made, and customer prompted to cancel it?). However, as she was not actively watching for her emails on her phone, she missed this until we got to the place. The website, which uses “designmynight’s” booking platform does NOT handle bookings in real time, and I think someone has to manually confirm/reject bookings during the day. The website does NOT indicate which time slot is available, so you are shooting in the dark hoping the booking slot is free (again the website makes it looks like it is!). The final page says “booking confirmation” and gives you a booking number and says “boom you’re in”, again indicating the booking is successful. This can be very misleading when you are under the assumption you have booked something, LIKE ANY OTHER WEBSITE, shows the time slots in real time!? The website itself, ALWAYS mentions the word “booking” and say NOTHING about it being an “enquiry!!

Customer service: We arrived at the venue and mentioned we had a booking. One of the customer service reps, a tall black man, asked for the booking reference and my friend gave him her phone which had the email with the booking reference number (again it is not called an “enquiry number”). He simply hands her phone back and says something quietly which we didn’t hear, she queried him again only for him to say “read the email again” without stating what, if anything, is wrong at this point. She said “sorry, what do you mean”, and he went on to say that again! My friend then came to realise that the email was in fact a “enquiry”, although everything up until this point made it seem like it was a “booking” confirmation. However, she understood the fact that she did not thoroughly read the “confirmation” email and missed the “cancellation email”! Instead of him actually serving the customer, and telling us when the next available slot, he started to further continue his sass and sarcasm when I went on to ask him when is your next available slot and said not today unless you want to wait till tomorrow. He was very unfriendly and did not make us feel welcomed, as we really wanted to visit and instead of telling us in the first instance when the next slot is available, we had to instead ask him and receive his sass and sarcasm in return! He was speaking to us like he was a teacher, in a condescending tone, “read the email”, instead of just telling us what was the issue and explaining the RUBBISH booking system they have in place. The most aggravating fact of the experience was the fact my friend felt like she was being treated like a “dumb girl”, the person thought he just had the right to speak to someone like that in a sassy sarcastic manner, I guarantee this would not happen if it was an older male! I cannot imagine how this behaviour would impact someone who has a hidden disability (e.g. autism or reading difficulties)!

Suggestions: Please make a real time booking system and train your staff to do actual customer service and if you can’t, don’t let them speak to customers in the...

Quite possibly the most disorganised venue in London. A bottomless brunch for two was booked, and I arrived as a third hoping to add on a third. We arrived, it was quiet, we saw our booth had plenty of space for a third, there were 4 controllers, we thought perfect! But no, that's when the problems started. We were told they don't take walk in bottomless brunches so i'd had to book online. Fine, so we tried that. Their website wouldn't allow me to book online for that day. Asked if i could book for the next day, be served today, and not turn up tomorrow, no that doesn't add up with their system so can't do that. At this point i'm thinking why is this so difficult. You charge me £35, and bring out an extra glass when serving drinks to a bottomless brunch you're already staffed enough to service. It's not like we've added an additional 10 people to the party. Anyway after needing to get the manager involved, they'd agreed to charge me the gaming and the pizza, and they kindly offered as a gesture of good will to put the drinks on my friends bottomless brunch, so it actually worked out cheaper than a bottomless brunch at £26, so I thought great! Half an hour into our 90 minute brunch, we hadn't been served a drink, over the next hour we had 2 glasses of prosecco, up until the last 5 minutes when they served us another round of drinks, and then came over and said your time is up. So what was meant to be a bottomless brunch ended up being 3 rounds of prosecco. Not what you'd expect from even your cheapest bottomless brunch.

Then to top it off, we were met with £100 bill to settle at the end, which made absolutely no sense. My two friends who'd booked online had already paid their £35 which was supposed to cover everything, and my portion was meant to be £26 as promised earlier. So again we had to get the manager involved to understand where this additional £74 had come from because as far as the receipt was concerned it did in fact take into account my friends paying in advance and had deducted their £70 from the total. So they were actually charging £170 for a 90 minute bottomless brunch for three people, which served 3 rounds of drinks. The only explanation they could give was the prebooked party was only a deposit (which in that case is falsely advertised online, so rightly so refused to pay anymore) and their "system only allows us to put two free drinks through, so you will have to pay for the rest" so all of a sudden, this 'gesture of good will' has turned into one glass of prosecco costing £74. The maths just doesn't add up.

She then offered to take the service charge off, which lets face it i'm surprised she even tried to charge that seeing as their service had been appalling throughout, and all of a sudden it was £26! So what was it? Was it the service charge? Or was the 1 round of prosecco costing £74? Or more likely had you just plucked a number out of thin air in the hope we wouldn't notice?

None of it made sense, they kept blaming their systems, no one knew what was going on, everyone was so disorganised. At one point they seemed to have more staff than customers, the staff had no idea what they were doing, and apparently they charge you whatever they feel like at the time. If you were thinking of going here because it seems like a fun experience, I'd highly recommend finding somewhere else. This place is more hassle than its worth. Avoid...

This is going to a very honest review. The concept of this place is great and lots of people are hyping it up on social. It needs to have better management and structure in order for it to be executed correctly.

I booked a surprise date night for myself and my boyfriend a week ago (July 28) and our date was for Aug 7. I preordered the BBQ and Supermario pizza plus a raspberry sorbet (a week before).

We arrived around 5 mins earlier than our booking at 7:30PM. The manager (Maneece) told us to wait by the retro games until our booth was ready and that someone would come get us. It was around 7:40 when I went and asked her if our booth was ready because she clearly forgot we were even waiting - she then told someone to give us our booth.

We’re playing games and also waiting for our pizza to come out, I asked one of the waiters about our order and they were shocked about it. They went to ask the “kitchen” about it and came back to tell us there was no chicken or bacon (the main ingredients to the BBQ pizza lol) so we said politely, ok no worries can we then have ham and pepperoni? No big deal. They went to ask the manager if that was ok and we assumed it was as they never came back to inform us. It’s around 8:45pm at this point and we still haven’t gotten our pizza so we ask another person (turns out to be the supervisor) and he gives us a shocked face and asks who we gave the order to, we tell him, then he apologizes. And we continue to wait for our food…

9PM comes and the original waiter tells us we have about 15 more minutes on the games. I said excuse me we’re still waiting on our food which I preorder a week ago?! And he sort of tells us he will tell the kitchen to rush it…keep in mind they had been apparently making our food for the past hour and half at this point.

We get our food and ingredients are missing so I go up to say we have been waiting for our food for about two hours now and this isn’t even the right ingredients…they tell me they have no more mushrooms so they can’t add the missing ingredient…ok. So then I said to them “well we have been waiting for two hours now and we even got the wrong order for both pizzas now, so what can you do about it?” The waiter said he would go ask the manager. (Need to mention that there was also a hair in the pizza and that was pretty gross)

He comes back to deliver a message from the manager and I said to him “nope, if she’s back there she can come and talk to us herself” so he goes to get her. She then shows up by the till and seems like she’s avoiding us, turns out she was as she scurried away and avoided the entire issue and left the staff to deal with it.

We end up learning that most of the staff it was either their first week on the job. The waiter even ended up telling us there was bacon and chicken and mushrooms so our pizza should have never been switched (really frustrating!!) we also noticed another table had been waiting ages for nachos…like c’mon

The supervisor was nice enough to come and explain it to us, he refunded us for our food (not the entire experience) but okay we’re grateful for that and for his patience.

Id recommend getting another manager who can actually handle the job and help their colleagues out when needed. It ruined our night, but thank you to Romario for helping...