POLPO Italian Restaurant Soho — Restaurant in London

First the positives: The staff were great, really friendly. Nice vibe if a bit cramped but can forgive that with the rates and rents restaurants have to pay in central London location. Unfortunately, for me, that's the end of the positives.

The food isn't great and gave me the distinct impression that it's more about the bottom line than the food. When I'm cooking at home I judge my food by asking myself would I be happy to find this sort of thing in a restaurant? Would I be happy to pay for this food? The reverse is true when eating out: Could I cook similar at home or even better? I'm afraid in Polpo's case the answer is yes I could and easily better and with little effort. Also, wine in tumbers? OK.

We ordered two kinds of meatballs the pork/beef and the lamb with slow roasted garlic. Neither have a nice caramelized outside from that would give the meatballs and sauce flavour. The meatballs are dry and pappy because far it contains far too much binder such as breadcrumbs in order to cheapen the ingredients. The flavour is lacking and the sauce is barely reduced passata.

The pizza was doughy and pale from not being in the oven long enough. Any Italian would find it a disgrace. The crust is almost half the pizza! (there's that cost cutting again) The topping you do get is ok but nothing special.

The fritto misto was pretty terrible. The cod chunks were way over cooked and neither myself nor my other half could bring ourselves to eat them. The octopus and squid were also done to death rendering them dry and rubbery... not that you got much squid or octopus... The prawns were okay. Over done again. Most of the dish was taken up by courgettes which actually were fairly nice.

I feel like in the last few years there has been an evolution. There are loads of places doing really great food that's similar to this and prices better than this whose passion for food and generosity shine brightly on the pate! I really wouldn't bother with this place. This feels on par with a chain like zizzi, ask italian, or strada. You can do much better. I would go elsewhere. I would certainly not...

Soooo if you were to describe this place in a word it would be “meh”.

I would recommend having the appetisers and maybe the cicchetti as we didn’t try them. But the nduja arancini and the potatoes croquettes with truffle were okay ( I don’t know how they cooked them but one of the arancini was cold in the middle).

But here comes the interesting part, fritto misto had a good batter but looked paler than a vampire. Shrimp/gamberi were cooked whole and not cleaned, could see the black line(intestine inside, not removed), that disappointed but then come the steak and octopus tonnarelli.

Steak was probably one of the worst tasting steaks I’ve ever had, no sear, cut up already into multiple cooked pieces so you can’t see what temperature it was cooked at, when asking the waiter how it was cooked he said some pan with medium to high temperature, I honestly doubt it was and overheard from one of the waiters that some things were microwaved.

Octopus tonnarelli: the pasta was cooked perfectly, sauce was okay tasting but had massive chunks of carrot in there which could have been cut up a bit smaller, octopus was tough as a mo**er and wasn’t cleaned of the skin and suckers still on, making it even tougher.

Overall we paid £97 with a 50% discount on food because we work in hospitality.

We ate everything cause my brother is a dumpster and always feels guilty to complain but we wouldn’t really return for dinner, maybe a drink and a cicchetto but no mains, avoid those please.

Staff: Manager was friendly, but other staff didn’t really know what was going on unfortunately - i.e. waiter when we asked him how the steak was cooked seemed like as if he was asked to explain Einstein’s...

I can’t believe I have to write a review about someone who would purposely wake a sleeping baby because she’s having a bad day at work but here we are!

We popped in for late lunch, life long Londoners but with a fresh little one we asked if the pram would be ok, the waiter kindly said yes, sit wherever you’d like, we chose the edge of the bar to be considerate to other diners. Once we’d settled he said actually they shouldn’t really let babies be near the bar but never mind it would be fine. The barmaid tosses a drinks menu at us and otherwise ignores us. Her manager walks over and she absolutely rages about losing her bar license in earshot so the manager kindly asks us to move to a table, we’re happy to oblige! Baby is sleeping, we’re just trying to grab a quick bite, why on earth would we care where we sit or have any skin in trying to lose someone’s bar license?

All good right? No… the barmaid then starts smashing bottles into bins and making as much noise as possible until our baby wakes up and then oddly enough her noisy jobs are over for the next hour. I’d like to not believe someone could be so petty, so thanked her on our exit as we’d seen her say goodbye to other customers, to which she grunted and didn’t lift her head. And we paid 13.5% service charge. Bananas.

I saw her being stand off-ish with a pair of regulars also, such a shame when one person can tank an atmosphere. Thank you to the manager and waiter for accommodating us.

Sadly the food was average, have been a few times over the years pre-baby and it’s always just fine. After today it’s off the list...